Shorten free glissando lines - line-elements too big?

Hi dear Dorico team,
I have the following problem: I want to indicate free glissando lines after each note of a melody (so that the players always start with this note and then do a more or less random gliss). Dorico’s individual line creater is great in general, and I added up a combination of some of the proposed random gliss.-lines.
Bildschirmfoto 2024-07-16 um 15.08.35

but in this case the single symbols that then add up for the longer lines are so big, that only one of them takes already too much space.

I tried at first to layout it individually, but not only that takes a lot of time (and will each time create new layout problems as soon as one starts to write more music into the other staff lines), but as well if one wants to keep roughly the proportions between quarter and dotted half notes, it takes very very much space. Here it would be about the maximum to have 4 bars for a page.

Is there an option (or if not yet would you be able to include this into one of the next updates) to say: just interrupt this line somewhere in the middle of the line-element, just when the next note comes? This would allow to be much more flexible with all bigger line elements. Dorico might then just show the line until the next note and then just cut it, without having to add either the FULL next individual symbol, or not adding anything (which then often creates big gaps, if the space ist just slightly too small. (like happening here if one just tries to squeeze the space a little bit:)

Or is there any efficient work around?

Thanks for your help!

Perhaps you could just use a single wiggly line over the three notes?

the wiggly line symbolises a regular shake (I use this already for another technique) but here they should play randomly improvised glissandi.

And I found another collision problem, somehow sometimes the line is going on althouth it shouldn’t and then creates collisions: (see here in the third bar)

We can’t easily “chop” these wiggly lines, I’m afraid. Really what’s needed is a more dynamic way of creating these kinds of randomised lines, rather than relying on glyphs from a font to draw them, and hopefully in future we will be able to implement that.

3 Likes