Hi!
I’ve sometimes seen folk song books for languages using right-to-left writing systems (Hebrrew, Yiddish, Arabic, Syriac, etc.) writing the sheet music in the ssame direction with the clef, key signature and time signature on the right side of the page. Is this possible to do in Dorico Pro 5?
With quite some effort it might be doable:
reattaching note stems would also be possible etc.
Or one could write from left to right and reverse everything in a vector graphics program:
I experimented with this a while ago. Here’s a hymn book that I was trying to replicate:
What I did was to edit the note-stem attachment points in the Notehead Set Editor to be on the “wrong” side. That gives me this:
I then exported that as a PDF, and loaded it into Affinity Designer. I then flipped the whole page.
Once everything has been flipped, I had to flip the clefs and accidentals to face the left. Also the flagged quavers need flipping back!
The astute will notice that the dots on the F clef don’t match: For some reason, they’re proving hard to separate in AD; but I’m sure it can be fixed.
I suspect with a bit more prep work in Dorico – separate noteheads for quavers and crotchets; custom clefs, then you’d just need to flip it in AD, and you’d be done!
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A discussion at Musescore forums started a few years ago.
How did you do the first one?
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First I wrote an invisible clef, and no time signature (“open”)
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I wrote the music as usual, inserting barlines where needed with Shift-B.
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Then I inserted the clef, flat and time signature with Shift-X, where I inserted glyphs one by one
With a bit of searching I found everything needed: reversed clef, reversed accidentals et.:
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In Engrave Mode I made room for this reversed preamble with th horizontal spacing tool.
This was just trying things. For a real project I would try to build blocks of symbols more consistently.
This method would have the advantage that lyric syllables could be input as normal. With the other method which I and @benwiggy also tried – reversing the whole lot in a graphics program – I’m not sure what the best way would be to handle lyrics.
In Bravura font (and possibly other SMuFL-compliant fonts), the reversed treble clef is available at U+E073 and the reversed bass clef at U+E076.