Vanishing Braces

[pmc.galoubet]

Hi again @johnkprice!

I found this in a 4.3. Topic:

@johnkprice

I have found a better solution. In engrave mode, delete the existing bracket(s) and then add a bracket with wings to the choir staves and a brace to the solo staves. Now we need to make the brace disappear without affecting the barline joins at the end of each system. In Engraving Options>Brackets and Braces, open the Advanced Options under Braces and uncheck Use flat brace for span larger than maximum ‘Larger brace’ span. Instead of being thin and flat, the brace is now thick and curved. In Library>Music Symbols, search for Larger brace and delete its glyph. Now the brace has disappeared but the barlines of the solo staves are still joined at the end of each system.

I tried it on a different situation and of course it worked, I was flabbergasted, but not surprised to be flabbergasted if you get my meaning. The only problem was that the gap between the Braced staves doubled. I looked in Vertical Spacing/Ideal Gaps and I saw
Braced Staff to Braced Staff: 2 spaces.
I thought: Ah of, course now they are Braced, so I changed that to 1 Space.
The spacing returned to what I had… but the Brace (or rather some Brace) reappeared ! Do I have to destroy a different glyph in the Braces Editor?

I could live without the barjoins, or with the braces. I cannot believe that you have ready all the spectacular solutions that you deliver to us, so you must each time(or most times) plunge into research. Don’t kill yourself .

[pmc.galoubet]

Weel, never mind, I removed the gkyph for the Large brace, and it works, Hope that you did not spend ypur time on t.

[pmc.galoubet]

I had some finishing touches to do, which went rather well, but I realized I have still a problem, and I do not know whether it is related to the barline joins or not.

First my (experimental!) project contains 2 “groups” of players, the first is a normal Harpsichord Grand Staff (braced), the other is a home-made group of home-made 1-line pitched instruments. That second one needed the magic trick with hidden braces. Now all the barlines are joined, event between the 2 “groups”. From things I had read, I expected those could not be joined, and would have been ok with that, but I am quite ok this way either.

In Dorico screens, whether Write, Engrave, or Print preview, there is no problem and I am quite happy. But the pdf has a problem, which drives me crazy!
All the system breaks look like this:

There are gaps at the end of the staff lines of the second group, and even without gaps, one can see that the ends of the grand staff lines are misfit.

Also the bars have so much content that dorico was naturally satisfied to keep a one system, one bar strategy, which I was also happy with.
Still I have been experimenting with one system, two bars strategy, which needed some specific tweaking, but again it is satisfactory in Dorico, but not in the pdf, whixh botches is somewhat differently:

How can the pdf not reproduce what is seen in Dorico Print Preview? Has anybody experienced that already? I know that there are print options, possibly based on View options, but the preview always take them into account!

[benwiggy]

@pmc.galoubet

All the system breaks look like this:

Can you supply larger, more detailed images? You’ve given us about 1cm of what looks like a 25 dpi low-res JPEG.

[pmc.galoubet]

Of course I will . But those are PNG, supposed to be hi-res, I kept them small because between the post paragraphs, they consumed enormous vertical space. I will do better now that they will be standing by themselves!

I think the resolution is good enough? If you prefer bigger, please just ask

[pmc.galoubet]

Oops, sorry! The second image is totally irrelevant! Here is the right one:

[pmc.galoubet]

@pmc.galoubet

All the system breaks look like this:

is not totally true, there are 2 type of systems that are protected from pdf damage:
The system ending with a one repeat bar (%)
The systems ending with a special barline (end repeat bar, final bar).

[pmc.galoubet]

I have 2 versions of the project, both quite heavy (because I created a heavy structure). They both have the same contents, but with different horizontal spacing options one has 15 pages, the other 6. Both documents have a footprint a little above 3MB.
Let me take the "small"one.

I switch to Print mode and hit Print.
The creation takes almost 1 minute.
The resulting pdf (PDF-1.7) weighs more than 9MB
There are annoying unexpected mistakes.

Now, still in Print mode I get curious and, maybe for the first time, I change Destination from Printer to Graphics, and change nothing else (wether I keep Color or change to mono will have any real impact, but I have no color anyway), and hit Export.
The creation is immediate.
The resulting pdf (PDF-1.4) weighs a little over 300k.
It seems perfect.

Then I took a second look and discovered

@jaredhaschek

I’d like to add a vote for Print Mode to be able to be set to default to Graphics - personally I very rarely print to a printer from Dorico, it’s nearly always to PDF. I would imagine a lot of people would be in the same boat (it’s a big boat).

A pity I was not already aware that the Printer choice was, not only costly in resources, but also error prone even if that must be rare.
But now I am very happy, and will close the subject, thanks to anybody who helped or tried to !