I made an entry error on an urtext project, and somehow ended up with a tick barline that appears on the bottom line of the staff (highlighted in orange):
The bottom tick remains when I reopen the project, even after restarting Dorico, and I can copy and paste it. I assume this is a bug, but is this a hidden feature/expected behavior? If so, I’d love to know how to reproduce it reliably, because I can think of use cases for the bottom-line tick.
When you’ve selected the one on the bottom, the others are selected too. So this is no bug; it means you entered that barline in up above, but did not alt-enter it into the other staves, so it applied to them all. If you delete it, it should disappear from all three staves. Then you can alt-enter it into the staves that you actually desire to apply it to (presupposing independent time signature as well)
No, I’m not talking about alt-enter—I’m referring to the appearance of the tick itself: it’s on the bottom line of the 5 line staff! I’ve never seen that before and it isn’t an option in the menu, nor is it in the documentation.
Unless the bottom tick (versus the top tick as seen in the tenor part) is something normal I was unaware of, in which case I’d love to know what its popover command is.
Oh good heavens you’re right! I totally missed the ball. How odd!
(I had read “bottom line of the staff” as “bottom staff line” ie-part, and didn’t even pay attention. Sorry lol)
If you could attach a cut-down version of the project itself, I can take a look. Unfortunately (as I am wont to say), a picture provides no debugging capabilities.
I asked if Dorico could include the bottom tick for the SingTheScore series I was engraving during lockdown.
As it turned out I asked just before a Dorico update, and although the barline was kindly included I gathered there wasn’t the time to document it.
In the shift-B popover type “tickbottom”, which you can Enter on all staves, or on one stave with Alt-Enter.
It’s a puzzle how your piece has include it. I wonder if you’ve accidentally found a keyboard shortcut - that I don’t know about!
Here’s a link to the post where I wrote about the series in the Dorico Music in Quarantine thread.
Top and bottom ticks are used where a note spans a barline, so reducing clutter and allowing the rhythmic feel of the original piece (that had no barlines) to flow while still including the nominal barlines that modern singers appreciate when reading from a full score that has a number of staves. Top tick is used when the preceding note is below the middle line of the stave, and bottom tick when above. The wonderful Mapa Mundi edition early music scores use a more extensive version of this idea par excellence.
A PDF and a Dorico file are included in the post if you want to see it in use.
For a quick glance here’s a screenshot of the opening.
Amazing! This is exactly the use case I have in mind. Now to go update my project.
I wonder how many more hidden features like this are floating around…? Perhaps there’s someone on the team who knows of whatever keyboard shortcut I accidentally pressed, because I certainly didn’t manage to type “tickbottom” into the popover.
That’s great!
In case you haven’t spotted it, you can copy and paste barlines. I tend to engrave the whole score, add in one tick barline, copy it, then paste it in the other places that need it.
The time consuming bit for me of spanning barlines (which I’m pretty slick at doing now) is that Note Spacing can then need adjusting in Engrave Mode. Here’s the same example as above with Signposts turned on, and you can see the red squares where I’ve made manual adjustments. Adjusting like this needs to be the final step in laying out the score.
Roll on when the Dorico team are able to give early music the Dorico attention!
Chris
