Asking for selfish reasons I guess, but I’m just wondering why the “hide notehead” option is on the engraving properties, and not the write properties? I understand it being on the engraving options, but…
In the example below, I have written an unspecific note as an end point of a gliss:
It’s pretty inconvenient in terms of workflow to be going from one screen to another and hunting through properties constantly to change this to the right notation - my instinct was that I could change this through noteheads, even if I need to make my own, but the notehead sets function won’t let me create that.
My thought is that if my intention is to “write” an unspecific note, then why am I writing that while I’m engraving?
The way I understand it, you aren’t writing it in engrave mode, you wrote it in write mode and you are changing the written note’s appearance in engrave mode.
Yes, but I’ve not written a note - I’ve written a not note - a rhythm without a pitch - and placed it roughly where I want the not note to be. I don’t want to write a note…
I don’t think I have - I don’t want to specify a note there - I want to write an unspecified pitch. Semantically, the system is wrong - my intention is not “to write a note” - it would be the same if I was to write a cluster.
Hi @eddjcaine, you can reach the (Toggle) Hide Notehead command (as well as Toggle Hide Stem and Toggle Hide Ledger Line*) also from Write mode, using the Jumpbar (you can create an alias too so is only a shortcut away )
A suggestion for aliases:
Toggle Hide Notehead (j) hn
Toggle Hide Stem (j) hs
Toggle Hide Ledger Line (j) hl
*Mhh… now that I see: the Toggle Hide Ledger Line is not reachable from the Jumpbar and is also not in Key Commands>Edit (would it be possible to add it, @dspreadbury? Or do I miss something?)
The gliss line does point to an exact note (that you have chosen). Otherwise it would go nowhere.. Whether that note is being displayed as a glass note or as a solid, visible note does not make a difference semantically.
No no, you misunderstand me. YES - at the moment, I need to write A NOTE and then HIDE it. That is the PROCESS, not the INTENT.
The intent is to write an unspecific note - a gliss leading to an empty rhythm at a rough position on the stave. Dorico is built SEMANTICALLY - here is the screen where we input stuff, here is the screen where we tidy it up. Here we enter notes and here we choose fonts.
I am entering an unspecified pitch, not a specific pitch. That is something I have to do because Dorico doesn’t yet support the semantic context in which I am working. It’s a work-around, just like Sibelius had workarounds when you couldn’t do stuff.
So argumentative. When I’m writing on the page, I just draw a line, and a stem. It’s not hard. I don’t know about the design of systems in Dorico - maybe they want to do it completely like in other systems - like for e.g. have an “unspecified note” object which has options to create a cluster, or to include accidentals. How I would think of it as programmer would be an object that behaves like a note but has different behaviours - doesn’t display a notehead, or displays a bar notehead across a defined region. Doesn’t display accidentals, except maybe in the middle of the bar notehead if that’s used.
It doesn’t seem to me to be hard to implement semantically, and in the meantime crucially there’s no reason to have the hide notehead option on the engrave panel, especially if you can just access it via the jump bar…
If one wants something special, it may take a little extra effort.
I doubt we should expect programmers to spend hours/days/weeks/months on a relatively infrequently encountered situation when plenty more crucial features deserve their attention and a straightforward solution is available to the user.
Well, you are asking the team to implement something that would make your workaround easier. Why didn’t you in the first place ask the team for the actual feature that would make your workaround obsolete?
A special invisible Notehead would avoid the trip to engrave mode. That being said, isn’t it possible to change the glyph for a notehead that you don’t use in your project to nothing, so that simply selecting this notehead from the context menu would solve your problem?
I don’t know how frequently you need to do this, but could you copy and paste while in Write mode? (or somewhat less acceptable, if you have Keyboard Maestro, Stream Deck, or some other macro app, automate the keystrokes)? I do agree with your premise that “hide notehead” could, at least, be accessible in the Write mode properties. (Although I have seen properties such as “color” that don’t always appear to “pass through.” Perhaps that’s just a problem with color not always being fully functional!)
— Jim
A correlated, if OT of the Dorico feature request, musical observation about your notation: if I were performing that score, the presence of the ledger lines together with a normal-length stem (and flag) and — most strongly — gliss line would still suggest to my eye that my target is something in that third space below the staff. Is that what you’re hoping for, or do you really just want something “lower than…” (what?)?
I ask this since the answer might serve to fine-tune a feature request.
I think that’s correct to interpret it that way, but I would also like to indicate freedom to interpret it as a gesture. If I was playing it I’d think - oh right they want me to gliss down to about there - it makes this sort of sound. I.e not specifically aim for a note