Coming From Finale. I’ve been Trying to figure this out for days now. I’m mainly a lead sheet pop jazz chart writer. Im trying to get rehearsal marks to offset in the left margin of a system with text labeling each section. I have to do this many times like in this chart below.
I figured out how to offset the rehearsal marks horizontally in the engrave option for rehearsal marks.
“Horizontal Position” - Horizontal offset for rehearsal mark aligned with systemic barline
This option works fine for single staff instruments but no effect on multi staffs such as keyboard or grand staff.
Another problem with text for labeling each section. I’ll create text that says verse under a rehearsal mark and move them manually in engrave mode. But when I create other text it moves. I really need to be able to spot text to a specific position. To have to move these every time is really time consuming. In finale I could make frequently used text in advance and specifically spot it anywhere in the score with a key command. Is there another way to go about this. Thanks in advance
Welcome to the forum, @Dewittgz. There’s currently no good automatic way to produce this kind of alignment. As you’ve found you can get rehearsal marks to line up with the systemic barline, but you can’t get them to go into the margin by default.
What might help a tiny bit is that when you add your text section labels, if you deactivate the Avoids collisions checkbox in Properties, you will be able to freely move the text in Engrave mode without it causing anything else to move around.
It is still so very cumbersome to deal with rehearsal marks and text combined horizontally. Particularly in big band scores the use of text to define a feel or describe what’s happening overall is very common.
The choices we have right now (6.1) are:
deal with the randomness as good as you can, by turning off collision avoidance, and setting X offset, but that leaves us with many different results depending on the position on the page of that particular bar in score and parts. No matter what you try to force, you’ll always have to tweak manually throughout all your parts, for all the text you have used. Not good.
create and use Tempo marks instead of Text and do not forget to set their actually tempo… THIS IS ACTUALLY WEIRD: Dorico manages Rehearsal Marks / Tempo Marks horizontal spacing perfectly –> so why can’t it (still) deal with Text?
An option that is out of the question, could actually be a solution that I suspect is not so hard to develop by the Dorico team:
→ Use “suffix” provided with the rehearsal mark
Why is it out of the question?
Your extra text is always IN the enclosure
Solution:
provide the option to put the suffix out of the enclosure
Still, I can imagine that for some of us, this would not satisfy.
The core problem here is Dorico’s failure to deal with auto-alignment of text. I guess it is hard to solve. If not, it is overlooked or not considered a priority.