I’ve started working on a new piece in Dorico 3.5 and I had a few questions about the new lines, and time signature background erasing.
I’ve attached the Dorico project file as a zip folder attached to this post.
In measures 14-24 I have the first violin doing a random harmonic gliss which I’m trying to represent with a custom line body made out of the “quasi-random squiggle” repeatable symbols. I want to erase the background of the time signatures so that they don’t collide with the random squiggly line, so I’ve checked the box in Engraving Options that erases the background of time signatures inside the staff. For some reason, in Galley view the time signature background is erased properly, but in Page view the line still cuts right through the time signatures, and disabling/enabling the erase background checkbox in Engraving Options doesn’t seem to change it. Is this a bug or is there something I’m not understanding here? How do I fix this?
I thought that the basic random squiggly line provided in the Dorico symbols was too small/narrow in vertical range to depict the kind of wide random gliss I wanted, so I tried to enlarge the symbol using “scale” in the Edit Repeatable Symbols editor. For some reason it doesn’t appear to let me scale the symbol unevenly- have a different scale factor for X than for Y- which I kind of wanted since I wanted the line to wiggle a bit slower and cover a wider range but not exceed the staff too far.
Also, when I tried to combine multiple different random wiggle symbols to make the line look more random, the different symbols were not lining up vertically to form a continuous random-looking line (See the attached picture “Edit Line Bodies Y Offset.png” for an example of this- the 2 symbols don’t line up vertically). While I can edit the repeat offset of each symbol in the X direction, I could not figure out how to edit the Y offset of the symbols relative to each other within the line body. I tried editing the offset of the individual symbol within the symbol editor, but it doesn’t seem that Dorico takes this offset into account when it combines the symbols into the line, so no matter what value I set the symbols still didn’t line up. Is there any way to shift the symbols vertically to line them up within the line?
Also, in order to make the random line look random enough these individual symbols are quite large. This means that when Dorico creates a system break (such as here in mm. 17-18), it can’t fit a full symbol before the end of the system so it stops the line visually quite a ways before the system actually ends. I was wondering if there was any way to get Dorico to draw a partial symbol for the line up until the last barline of the system, much like Dorico could draw a partial slur for slurs that cross system breaks? If not, is there any other way to fake this?
Maybe I’m not using these custom lines in the best way, but I’m struggling to figure out what the best solution would be to create a line that curves randomly up and down around the staff to indicate random glissando. I wish there would be a way to create a graphics frame that is attached to certain measures and certain staves as opposed to the pages, so I could draw lines freely on the staff itself much like I would do by hand, and then have them travel with the music if it is reformatted.
A final, smaller question: is it still not possible to draw 2 glissando lines between Dorico’s artificial harmonics? It’s easy when you create a fake artificial harmonic (2 notes, one with a changed notehead), but with Dorico’s default harmonics created in the properties panel, it always still seems to create only one glissando line- for the stopped pitch (in the attached project I’ve had to fake it by creating an additional custom line that looks like a gliss line between the two diamond noteheads).
Thanks for your help!
Piece for String Quartet + Harp.zip (650 KB)
