Hi all,
I have an unorthodox need. I need to notate an approximate “behavior” for a percussionist, then give him a line indicating “play sort of like this, for the duration expressed.” Something like the attached manuscript. Any suggestions?
No appropriate way to do that, yet. I’ve done it either with text or outside Dorico, be it actually outside or just importing a graphic.
If you want to try to get creative within Dorico itself, you can use a text frame of essentially zero height with a border set on it to produce the horizontal line, and then perhaps add the arrowhead using a Shift+X text item with a character like this one, suitably enlarged: ▸
You may find, however, that being unable to hide rests in the percussion staff becomes problematic.
The thick line in the attached image is actually a crescendo with a thickness of half a space, where the closed aperture is set to half a space and the open aperture is set to half a space. I set up a macro in Pulover’s Macro Creator (a frontend for AutoHotKey, and I could easily achieve the same in Keyboard Maestro on Mac) to automate the various toggles and text entry required for this, as I needed lots of these in a score and parts. No reason why you couldn’t add a Shift-X “>” on the end of it, if you so wished.
Ha, that’s nice, Leo. Using a hairpin is better than using a graphic frame, since of course the hairpin lives within the music.
I can’t take credit for the workaround, Daniel! This topic has come up here before…
Input a crescendo. Then go into Engraving mode, select the crescendo and look down to the properties panel (the bottom panel). If it’s not showing then click on the arrow at the bottom of the window or type Cmd/Ctrl-8.
Is that sufficient? I can go into more detail in the morning (9-10 hours from now, probably!) if you need more…
pianoleo, thanks, that’s great, but how’d you place it in the middle of the staff?
And is there no way to hide the rests in Dorico?
Not on percussion staff.
I hope it’s gonna get impleted soon because even transparency and 0% scaling are not effective as a work around
Oh, I just shunted it up in Engrave mode. Nothing cleverer than that!
There is actually (well not really, but you can achieve the same thing). Change the rests to notes, then mute them (if you don’t want them to mess up playback) and hide them using the 0% scaling-method. Using the transparancy work around won’t hide the stem though, so go with the scaling way.
If you have a bunch of other notes in the bar with stems going all over the place, you might run into some trouble, but in many situations I believe they can be solved.
Scaling to 0% doesn’t yield a true 0%, which is a problem if you intend to print the result.
Does the transparancy work around hide notes completely when printed? If so you can enter a tuplet and hide. If you want to hide an eighth note, select 8th note for inputing, add a tuplet with the 8:1 ratio and enter a whole note. Then you can set the opacity of the 8 and the whole note to 0%.
Thanks Bastis, didn’t think about this workaround.
Hopefully it’s gonna be fixed 
How do you implement the 0% scaling method?
Write mode > Edit menu > Remove Rests 
Thanks!!!