Is there a way to easily put all staff labels on top of the staff? I have a client who uses that setup (which is a standard in musical theater by the way). We’ve been doing it the following way, but it’s really a nightmare:
- Set the staff labels to be left-aligned
- Set a negative value to the horizontal position of the staff labels in Engraving Options (and finding the right value is something we have to do by trial and error)
- In Setup mode, edit the instrument names one by one and add spaces underneath or play with the baseline
Not only is all of the above a real pain, but it doesn’t work for instruments that are written in systems, like a piano, because the vertical position of the name will change if the space between staves increases.
Also, this will only work for one flow, because character names vary in length from one song to the next, so the value in step 2 can’t be the same for all flows.
I know we can also hide the staff labels and use staff text, but that’s even more complicated, not only because we have to enter the texts into each system (yes, we can copy and paste them, but that’s a real pain), but because we would have to manually adjust the position of the texts, because he wants them to be close to the initial barline and because of what I mentioned above about piano systems. (Yes, I know we can align the texts to the initial barline, but that’s not where he wants them.)
This whole process of tweaking and workarounds doesn’t seem to be aligned with Dorico’s vision and is really frustrating, not so much for me but for him. I also wonder why this feature hasn’t been implemented, considering it seems to be so widely used in musical theater.