Section titles vertical order tempo and text - Dorico 4 improvement?

Dorico
1

Is there in Dorico 4 a way to introduce Section Titles (in the same flow) which will appear ABOVE (rather than below) a tempo marking? Thanks, Guy

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2

I don’t think there’s an automatic way of determining the vertical stacking order of system-attached text items relative to tempo marks.

However, depending on what you mean by “section titles” and where you want them to appear, you could perhaps use Dorico’s automatic flow headings, and customize what’s contained within a flow heading, its text alignment, and gaps above/below?

3

I mean titles like “Waltz 1” “Transition”, “Waltz 2” - all within a fairly short piece, so it makes no sense to treat these sections as separate flows - they can be as short as 10 bars.
I vaguely remember Daniel writing somewhere that they were aware of this issue and were hoping to address it in a future release.

4

Right, yes that does make sense. For now at least, if you disable collision avoidance for the text items, that’ll make it easier as then you only have to move the text items, the tempo marks will “fall” into place once you disable text collision avoidance.

5

I know it’s not an ideal solution, but I’ve dealt with this in the following way:
I’ve created a specific paragraph style for sections. That way, once you have all your sections in place, you can select one → Select more, and then unclick Avoid collisions and nudge them up. Bear in mind that, being system objects, even if you tick “Globally”, you’ll have to repeat the operation in each part, if you show them in parts.
As a bonus tip, if, like mine, section titles collide with rehearsal marks, you can add an indent of 7 pt. or so, and when you untick the “Avoid collisions”, they’ll stay besides rehearsal marks in most cases.

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6

Can you adapt Rehearsal Marks to your purpose?
Set the first letter by offsetting the index to the appropriate letter’s position in the alphabet.
Add the rest as a suffix.

EDIT: Guess not, since Collision Avoidance is not available. One could, of course, make manual adjustments in Engrave Mode (and the new alignment cross-hairs are invaluable here).