Is there an easy way to place text below the staff?
Instructions such as “sim.” or “simile”, “rall.”, “rit.”, or expressive markings like “dolce”, often appear as italicized text below the staff, or between the staves for piano music, along the same plane as dynamic markings.
I’d rather not have to “shift - x” and deal with dragging things around in Engrave mode on a regular basis.
F for Flip.
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Fantastic! Been using “F” in other contexts. Didn’t presume it would work like that for text.
Many thanks!
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It works for anything that has an Above/Below property: Slurs, Text, Stems, dynamics, Figured Bass, tuplets, etc, etc.
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Sometimes I write a dynamic with a suffix, e. g. mp dolce, and click “hide intensity marking” in the bottom zone. Then it appears italic in the correct position.
For what it’s worth, now that the paragraph styles have greatly improved (since Dorico 3), I created an expression paragraph style that looks exactly like a dynamics suffix, saved as default, gave it a cmd-e shortcut, and this has really streamlined the process 
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On a recent work I found that using a hidden dynamic with a visible suffix above the staff (of a vocal part) would tuck under chord symbols, whereas text boxes would not. I realize that does not likely affect opera scores, but for folks that use chord symbols, adding short text additions using the dynamics function can save some work.
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It’s worth mentioning that although gradual tempi are sometimes shown in italics in some old scores, Gould recommends keeping these in bold, so that all tempi look similar (and above the staff), and distinguishable from expressions.
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Hi, how did you manage to make it to stay below the staff by default?
I have done the same and created a paragraph style but I always have to manually place it below.
Thanks!
There’s no way to add “below the staff” to a paragraph style. I just press F to flip it to below.
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