I’m running into a workflow/layout issue and can’t see a clean solution yet, so I’m hoping someone more experienced can point me in the right direction.
I’m working on a multi-movement orchestral piece with many flows. Between some flows there is spoken/recited text. To handle this, I’ve created separate “text flows” that contain a dummy instrument (an instrument that does not appear in any of the other flows). Each of these flows contains a single bar, with the time signature and tempo hidden, so that I can roughly match the flow length to the duration of the spoken text and keep a continuous overview of the work’s total timing.
What I’d like to achieve (see attached image) is this: in those text flows, I want the dummy instrument to show only the text frame attached to the bar, visible only in the full conductor’s score. Everything else should be hidden — staff lines and the full-bar rest.
I tried using a cutaway staff, but that seems to require an explicit end to the cutaway region and it also automatically introduces one visible bar with staff lines.
Is the best approach here to create a custom instrument with a zero-line staff (via the library), and then separately suppress the full-bar rest? Or is there a more idiomatic Dorico way to do this?
Is it something like this? Done with a 0-line instrument. The simplest is probably to do the text in another app, and insert the text PDFs into the finished Dorico PDFs.
Ideally, I’d really like a solution that stays within Dorico and allows the text to “flow” with the music/layout (i.e., it should reflow naturally if the layout changes). If possible, I’d prefer to avoid using a page-anchored text frame, since the piece is still in progress and, working together with the production team, changes may still happen.
At the moment, these spoken-text passages are attached to a kind of placeholder flow. I mainly need that flow for timing/overall duration tracking, but if there’s a better approach I don’t necessarily need to display that placeholder flow in the score.
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I think I’ve found a workable solution that meets my constraints:
Use a 0-line custom instrument for the “text flow”
Make the full-bar rest white (so it effectively disappears)
@Janus — just to clarify: I don’t want this text to appear in any player parts, and I also don’t want the placeholder/text flow to appear there either. The spoken-text material should be visible only in the full conductor’s score, for reference.
Just thinking out loud (I didn’t do the experiment): would it be possible to put the text in a different (bigger) type of Flow Heading (and make the dummy flow invisible in one of the ways described above)? You can create several Flow Heading types, and change from one type to another in a layout. Unfortunately, I suspect that a FH change is linked to the physical page, and not to the flow itself, and therefore will not move around when flows are inserted/removed before it, or simply change in length. Maybe there are people here who tried this?
