I guess it's been a bit over 5 months, but I finally finished manually laying out all of the orchestral parts for all 3 movements! Yay! It took placing 11,069 spacers to lay out all 91 pages.
I don't know if the script above would have helped much with laying out the individual parts, but I still haven't laid out the orchestral score, and it will probably help there, for being more aggressive with the tightening of the spacing, so thanks to Haymo for posting it! I might also try customizing it; there were a few decent heuristics I found when spacing the individual parts, so it might not be too difficult to make it dynamically choose spacer sizes based on context.
That said, it'd still be awesome to have some easier layout options in a future version of Noteworthy, even if it's just an option on bar lines in addition to "Force System Break (Top Staff Only)" like "Forbid System Break (Top Staff Only)", (or maybe a 3-option drop-down or radio button set named "Break System (Top Staff Only)": Default, Always, Never), that'd have saved tons of time. If you'd like a beta tester, I'd be happy to do what I can to help!
Edit: Chose more consistent names for the proposed 3 UI options in the parentheses in the last paragraph.
Yeah, having an option to adjust the overall horizontal spacing scale would be great. It would also be useful for individual systems to have an option on barlines to possibly break system (default), force break system, or never break system; or alternatively, to have an option to force a system break without any break since the last forced system break. If any one of those three were available, it'd be 10x less work than manually adding so many spacers in this case.
I'll start looking into making a tool to automatically add spacers of different sizes based on the surrounding content, though I'm quite busy right now, so I don't know when I'll get around to it. Maybe I'll work on the layout for the individual orchestral parts first, since spacing doesn't need to be as tight overall for the separate parts as for the score.
Not even with the tools/objects API? I'm grasping at straws, but it'd be a source of good motivation to finally dig into lua. I guess the worst case would be that I'd have to make a tool that would try to predict the needed spacers to respace everything and generate spacers everywhere, but maybe there's something easier than that.
I know there's a way to force a system break on a bar line or boundary, but is there an easy way to prevent a bar line from breaking a system?
For small things, just adding tons of spacers of different sizes worked to tighten things up and fit more in a single system. It worked for the solo cello part I just laid out, (movt 1, movt 2, movt 3), since only some systems needed to be spaced more tightly, but it doesn't really scale to be feasible for a big score. The original score has a relatively large vertical scale, but is quite tight horizontally, so almost every page needs to have the space tightened up to avoid the new score either being in tiny print or being way too many pages, (the 118 pages in the original are plenty already). If there was a way to just prevent a system break for a bar or two, that'd cover 90% of the cases easily, instead of having to insert and adjust thousands of spacers.
Layers - don't use the layer with the markings you don't want...
Yeah, that was what I tried first, before originally posting. I have the bow markings all set to be centred over the next note, but for some reason they weren't anymore when I used layering, even though I kept the notes (set to invisible) on the other staves with that in mind.
Tweaking each one until it's approximately centred over the next note again would take a ton of work. The layering approach would also mean that I'd still need 3 copies of the notes around, though I probably wouldn't need to update them as thoroughly when I make changes, given that they're invisible and just there for spacing.
If you go to Tools > Options, you can change any of those colors to a different color of your choosing. So, set all of the bow markings as Highlight 1, and the fingerings as Highlight 2. If you want to see both of those markings, change both of those colors to black. To hide either one of them, change the corresponding color to white.
Ah, thanks! I couldn't remember how/where to set up the colours properly, since I've never used them before; I'd been looking around a bit.
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This does have one drawback, that white is opaque, and will cover up any staff lines that are behind them. There does not seem to be a way to choose "transparent" as a color.
It should be okay in this case, because I've tried to place the bow markings far away from everything, to leave enough space for people to write in fingerings by hand. I did a bunch of layout work today to make sure there was plenty of space where needed.
I think I'll try this out, since I can't seem to find a font with empty glyphs out there, (searches for null, blank, empty, invisible, etc yielded no useful results), and though I'm sure some colleague at work could probably recommend some free font editor out there, (recommendations I found online for free font editors seemed mixed or no longer available), setting up the colours will take pretty much the same amount of work, and I don't use the colours for anything else anyway.
Set up a User font for your bow markings. Set up another User font for fingerings. Find or create a null font (mappings with no glyphs) Use the null font when you don't want to see something.
Haha, I love it! That is so awesomely hacky! I'll have to remember that trick. Has someone conveniently already put together a null font?
You don't need three files, all this can be done in just one, using three staffs.
That's a good point. It'd be easier than having 3 separate files, but I'd still have to make all changes 3 times, or copy-paste if it's an easy-to-copy contiguous block of changes with no markings in between. I tried to do it by layering of 3 staves and making everything but the markings and fingerings invisible in two of the staves, but the alignment seemed to go all wonky, and it'd take a long while to align every piece of text properly.
This has probably been asked/solved before, but my searching skills fail me. Is there an easy way to make text expressions that appear will in the printout conditional on some global (to the score) setting?
Specifically, I've made some cello solo parts that I want to make 3 versions of: no bow markings (up or down) or fingerings, bow markings but no fingerings, and both bow markings and fingerings. However, I might need to change the part later, and I don't want to have to try to keep 3 sets of files in sync, so I'm wondering if I can just have the bow markings appear conditional on one setting and the fingerings appear conditional on another setting. I'd like to be able to just switch between the settings and print them to PDF again. Bonus points if there's some way to make slurs show up conditionally too.
(I should probably learn how to write objects / tools myself, since I am a programmer, but this seems like the kind of thing that someone's probably already solved.)
Thanks for the quick replies, everyone! I just upgraded to 2.75 from 2.5.5 last night, so I hadn't tried out any user tools before. I couldn't seem to figure out how to use "Tremolo.ms.nwcuser.lua" on its own, (it kept giving an error message "Tremolo.ms.nwcuser.lua:31: attempt to index global 'nwcdraw' (a nil value)"). However, "Make Tremolo.ms.lua" worked great after a few tries. It'll save a lot of pages. Maybe I should learn some lua, too, although I heard it has *gasp* 1-based array indexing.
It is a fairly big project, though I've transcribed just over 50% of it already. I'll be sure to submit it to the Scriptorium once I've finished it and had some people check it over, both the violin version and the transposed cello version, (which will need consultation with people who play each of the instruments to verify +4th vs -5th decisions).
The bigger challenge is that I'm practising the solo part on cello, and it's quite a bit beyond my actual abilities, but I've made a lot of progress practising it over the past several months. Not everything translates perfectly over to cello, but there were only a few things that needed major changes due to the distances being about twice as far on cello, and some of the bits with double-stop octaves seemed to just be there so that the violin could be heard over an orchestra, which isn't as much of an issue on cello. That and the original bowings are bonkers.
Edit: I'm really liking 2.75 so far. A few things are finally there that I've been wanting since way back in 1.3.1; (I think that was the first version I used as a kid, but I can't remember for sure.)
This is my first post, so my apologies for not knowing the forum very well!
I'm transcribing an orchestral score so that I can transpose a violin concerto down an octave and a fifth for cello. I've transcribed the first movement, but it's ended up being 99 pages instead of the original 55, partly because I've written out sixteenths in full, instead of using notation like on the first page of music in the score I linked to above.
I can do something like the whole note with two angled lines above it for the single repeated note in the bar, (for the 2nd violins), but how would I put in the notation for the alternating sixteenths, (for the violas)? It looks like there's no option to specify a round open notehead, surprisingly, so I can't just make two sixteenths and set their noteheads. Any ideas?
(I'll probably have a bunch more questions regarding layout as I get closer to having the score done.)
It took placing 11,069 spacers to lay out all 91 pages.
Not even with the tools/objects API? I'm grasping at straws, but it'd be a source of good motivation to finally dig into lua. I guess the worst case would be that I'd have to make a tool that would try to predict the needed spacers to respace everything and generate spacers everywhere, but maybe there's something easier than that.
Is there an easy way to make text expressions that appear will in the printout conditional on some global (to the score) setting?