Occasionally on a score I’ll have a coloured box above a staff which says something like 5/4 (q, 3+2)
Sometimes I can delete it and nothing seems to change in the score, and sometimes I can’t delete it. The piece has local time signatures if that changes anything.
What is it and why does it sometimes appear?
The coloured box is a “signpost”. In the context of time signatures, it indicates either a hidden time signature or an explicit barline that you’ve input (which in Dorico-land amount to one and the same).
If selecting the signpost and deleting it doesn’t remove it, try selecting the barline and deleting that instead.
Ah okay so it’s kind of a warning that something might be wrong or missing in the notation? I had a final bar line but only on one instrument, so I deleted that and added a final bar line for all instruments and the signpost went away, thanks.
It’s telling you that something exists that might not be immediately obvious, or is hidden. A “normal” barline that you’ve explicitly input is impossible to differentiate from a barline that’s generated automatically according to the prevailing time signature, so it gets a signpost.
Dorico should show a final barline at the end of the flow automatically, according to the Notation Option you’ve set for the flow.
If you want specific advice about a particular project, please share it here.
No that’s fine thank you, I’ve sorted it out.
I put a final bar line where the actual piece finishes, but I’ve got some spare bars after that as I’ll need to keep pasting in loops of different length material later on and the final bar line will indicate where I need to trim them off. 