Suggestions for Staff Line Hiding and Accidental Coloration

Dorico
1

I’m very impressed with the capabilities of Dorico. I’d like to very strongly suggest a couple of new features:

  1. The ability to hide all staff lines in a document, while leaving notes and rhythms. It is already possible to do this by sizing down the staff line thickness to 1/10000, but when the document is exported as a native PDF, the staff lines remain visible. I have to first export as a PNG, and then re-export that PNG as a PDF, which is difficult to edit in an illustrator program like Adobe. Are you able to add a “hide staff lines” feature that works when the file is exported as a native PDF?

  2. The coloration of note heads is much appreciated, but are you able to expand this feature to include accidentals, stems, and beams? This would be a huge benefit in engraving exercises when a single polyphonic voice needs to be highlighted.

Thank you for considering these capabilities.

2

For #1 there is a 0-line staff instrument mentioned here Zero line staff - #9 by dspreadbury that I think will do what you want. For #2 I’ve wondered if being able to color sections based on dynamics might be something of interest especially if the music is being viewed on a tablet.

3

And welcome to the forum @aron.r.bernstein

Jesper

4

The PDF specification defines a zero-width line as “one device pixel”, meaning that it will always show.

Just open the PDF in Illustrator, and you can select and delete the staff lines. And color the stems, too. That will keep everything as vector artwork, rather than pixellated bitmaps of a PNG.

5

Thank you! Ever since Finale (which I’ve used for over 20 years) has been discontinued, I’ve been scrambling to get up to speed with Dorico.