I’ve been looking through various forum posts to learn how best to deal with positioning tempo marks and system text, specifically so they appear as desired in both the score and the parts, at the same time. To that end, I’ve learned of the importance of the “Common offset” versus the “Per-staff offset,” along with the Global and Local settings.
Having said all of that, I’m finding that tempo marks seem not to be affected by the “Common offset” settings at all, and I can’t figure out why that is. No matter what I change those numbers to the tempo mark does not budge. My goal here is to be able to move a tempo mark once and have that change be made across the score and all parts. As it stands now I’m finding I need to make the same change to the same tempo marks in every single part/layout individually. It seems there has to be a better way. Thanks!
This is purely aesthetic, and at least in this example more nit picking than crucial, but Dorico seems to insist that tempo marks appear above time signatures by default (as stated in the manual). This visually looks cramped to my eye, at least compared to our office house style. There could be other examples, but in this case all I’m trying to do is move the initial tempo mark to the right a bit, in every part, all at once. I wish there were a global setting to have tempo marks always appear over the first beat of music, even if a time signature is present. See screenshots. The first is where it defaults to and the second is where I’d like to see it. Unfortunately the Common Offset settings, which were helpful for moving system text globally, seem to be of no use for the tempo marks. It’s odd though, because the settings are there in the Properties panel. It leaves me feeling like either I’m doing something wrong or this is a bug.
For a piece that has multiple tempo marks where there are also meter changes it’s a lot of manual labor over dozens of parts. Especially so for a program that by and large handles this sort of thing so well automatically and globally in most other cases.
Yes, I did explore the Engraving Options. The horizontal placement options are very limited (non-existent?) for absolute changes, as far as I can tell.
Great idea, thank you! This offsets the score position more than needed for the parts to look right, but at least that just requires one manual move back rather than 20-30 across all parts.
I don’t see many horizontal options too, neither in the properties.
And if you attach the tempo mark not on the start of the bar, but a sixteenth or so further in write mode, that reflects nicely in all parts, but will break your multi-measure rest.
Could help maybe for those places where players are playing
If the tempo mark is selected when in Engrave mode, Properties > Tempo also has a Start offset property. Because this is probably a per-layout adjustment, you might like to try my previous suggestion to apply globally so that all the part layouts are how you want them, and then use Start offset in the Full Score layout to adjust the tempo mark only in the Full Score layout. You will probably need to set Set local properties to Locally.
