Staff indent and staff text

Dorico
#1

In order to indent a staff to the half of a page (like in picture 1 and 2) I must press down CTRL+ALT and click the left arrow about 200 times (two hundred)!
It takes on my system within the actual project I am working on about 6 minutes until Dorico is ready with calculating the result of these 200 cliks.
The project has 20 flows, the Full Score has 128 pages in A3 format.

I know exactly how many clicks I need because I need to do this quite often and I developped a method to do this as fast as possible: I click very fast on the left arrow and count fast from 1 to 10 and I do this 10, 20 or more times depending on how much the staff must be indented.
Don’t you find these are much too much clicks and it takes much too much time?
It seems as if Dorico is redrawing the page after each click.

Could you optimize this behaviour?
There are some values near to the staff handle, could you make it possible to type values there?
Another way would be also great if we could move the staff handle according to the rhythmic grid value!

In picture 1 you can see a staff text that has been inserted and set to Position Below in the Properties panel.
Dorico automatically inserts enough space under the staff to avoid collision with the next staff - nice.
But when I manually set some Offset values to the text as in picture 2 to move it at the wanted position, Dorico does not remove the no longer needed space between the staves.
I am aware that I can manually move the staves with the “Staff Spacing” tool but is there a way for Dorico to automatically recognize that the additional space is not necessary any more?

staff-text-1.jpg
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staff-text-2.jpg
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#2

I’m not quite sure what you want to produce here, but does the text need to be aligned “accurately” with the music, or just positioned approximately alongside the score?

If “approximately” is good enough, you could edit the master page to make the music frame occupy the left half of the page, and create a separate text frame on the right hand side. Set the text alignment to “top” rather than the default “center” and just space down by hitting “return” to line up the text with the music.

music and text.png
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#3

It’s about short dialogs occuring here and there within a song.
The music stops, a character speaks some short dialog, the music continues and so on.
Quite common in Musicals.

I am aware of music and text frames and this is what I used before for this task.
But I found out that this is at the end far easier and (theoretically) faster (see the very slow speed I described) to achieve this with staff indenting.
The downside is that with this solution dialog can be placed only before or after a system and not between two systems, but I can deal with this.
It is important to “attach” these dialogs to a staff because of maintenance reasons and because the vocal & Dialog part is present in at least 4 layouts (Full Orchestra Score, Small Orchestra Score, Vocal Score, Vocal and Piano Score).
When I work with Text Frames I have to create them again and again for each layout and they do not move when some formatting is necessary.
Also working with frames instead of indented systems makes it more difficult to change something afterwords.

But due to what I described in my first post the easiness of working with staff indent is disturbed because it takes so much time to accomplisch!
Therefore my questions.

#4

teacue, if you want text between systems, you can use frame chains:

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#5

@dankreider
Dan, I do know how to place text between frames.
I even posted an example in the second post of this thread:

It is a great way and sometimes very usefull indeed but as I explained to Rob Tuley I now prefer for these situations to use staff indent as it is much easier.
I only do hope that this task can be made faster in the future.

I attach an example of what I am doing, this time with the vocal part only.

music-and-dialog.jpg
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#6

That looks fun. I’d like to hear it!

I still think frame chains are the way to go. You’re fighting the program if you’re doing something that requires 200 clicks.

Why not make frame changes to accomplish the staff indent that you want? The beauty is that you have full control over how they look. One frame chain for a system at full width, the next frame indented however you want. Click and drag to create, and it’s done.

#7

Well, if you ask :wink:
https://www.teacuemusic.de/peter-pan/
Scroll a little bit, this is the song number 4 called “Ein Gesicht am Fenster”

Yes, 200 cliks should not be.
But I can assure you that despite of the 200 (or more) clicks it was finally faster than with changing frames.
I had already finished all the songs with the frame method!
I did it again with staff indent because it is also more flexible.
But it is nice to have several way to accomplish something :slight_smile:

#8

  1. It was not our intention that you would indent a system by this kind of huge offset using this tool: better, as things stand, to change the width of the music frame and add the text in a text frame instead (or indeed it could still be added as a Shift+X text item, and then drag it such that it draws outside the music frame. In the future I agree it would be optimal to have a more efficient way of applying an indent.

  2. When you move a text item, it doesn’t change its affect on staff spacing. But if you select the text item and switch off the ‘Avoid collisions’ property, that will do what you want.

#9

Glad to know that you will consider it.

Thank you, this solves my issue perfectly.

#10

I do think that it would be helpful if we could click and drag an indent inwards the same way you can click and drag staves up and down when adjusting spacing. That would be a quick and easy fix here.