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Break barlines

Does anybody know how to brak barline between staves and/or make a Grand/Orchestral (together)staff?

Re: Break barlines

Reply #1 –
Could you elaborate on your question?

You can force a system break from Bar Line properties (select the bar line, then Edit | Properties).

You can also set grand staff styles in conjunction with the orchestral style, if the grand staff style is not the first staff in the system.

Re: Break barlines

Reply #2 –
What Artur may be asking is how to construct a system of staves in which the barline does not run uninterrupted from the top of the system to the bottom, but rather has gaps between various groups of staves within the system For example, in an orchestral score, you might want each instrument family (woodwinds, brass, percussion, strings) to have its own continuous barline, with gaps separating the families.

(If not isn't Artur's question, I apologize, but this is one of the first questions that I asked myself when doing an orchestral score in NWC.)

The only way I've found to do this is to use staff layering. Imagine, for example, that you want a barline gap between second bassoon and first horn. All your wind and brass staves should have their Visual Style set to "Orchestral" so that their barlines connect with the surrounding staves. Then, below the second bassoon, create a new staff and give it the "Standard" visual style, and edit the second bassoon staff to turn on the "Layer with next staff" property. When you enable layering in File/Page Setup, you'll end up with a layered second bassoon staff that is connected to the staves above it (the rest of the woodwinds) but disconnected from the staves below it (the brass section).

Of course, if you're layering the bottom staff of a grouping anyway (e.g., you're constructing a "Bassoons" staff using layered 1st and 2nd bassoon staves) then you don't need to invent a third layered staff - just change the Style property of the lower of the existing staves.

Am I making this too hard? If there's an easier way of achieving this effect, I'd love to hear of it.

Re: Break barlines

Reply #3 –
To expand only slightly on Grant's post -- there is quite a bit you can do using the "dummy staff" layered under an actual staff. For instance, you can put bracketed (grand staff) pairs in the middle, even bracketed staves without continuous barlines (as can be handy for vocal lines such as sop and tenor, where you don't want the barlines interfering with the lyrics). Though it seems fiddly, it's really not too hard once you get the hang of it -- and easier to do by experimentation than to try to explain it.

Re: Break barlines

Reply #4 –
Grant got it, and I think it would be amaselingly nice to have a feature to do it, without using dummies and others, because they can screw things up when you export to midi. (e.g. try to open in winjammer and you´ll see lots of empty staves.)

Re: Break barlines

Reply #5 –
Artur, your reply makes me think of someone has written earlier.
I think there is a way not to export the "dummy" staves, but I cannot check it reite now.
Try to search on the "offline" forum.
BTW, your question leads me to an advice: make the layout as you want, but ONLY when you're done with entering "musical" (rests, notes, lyrics) data. Bar breaking can be done after; and the same goes for staff breaking (since it may change, depending on paper size)
On another side, the trick indicated by Grant may easily be automatically with that good old macro recorder, since it is always the same process (except placing the new staff at the proper place)
Here is the process in the most stable way, which is not exactly the same one would do "normally":
1. go to the staff where you want to break barlines under it (not in the macro)
2. edit properties of the staff (F2), and allow layering (I think Alt+Home will go to first tab), Validate (Enter)
3. select the whole staff (Home, Shift+End, Ctrl+Ins)
4. Create the new staff (Ctrl+A), copy the origin staff (Shift+Ins)
5. Edit its properties to "standard", upper size=8, lower size=8 (not to interfere with real size)
6. Open the menu for moving the staff to the place you want (stop recording the macro just before starting to move the staff)
7. Place the staff where you want.
The macro automatize the steps 2 to 6 incl., so you just have 3 actions to do now. Ain't that easy? :)
Of course, it doesn't replace the ability (that NWC doesn't offer (yet?)) to break bar without breaking the "system".

[Sorry if you find some error in the process over here, but I'm currently stuck on a VT100 terminal with no graphic capability, so writing this from memory]
If someone is interested, PLMK, I'll create and send the macro file. (This is much more quicker to do than a TT Font! ;)
HTH, Dominique

Re: Break barlines

Reply #6 –
     NoteWorthy simply and flatly has a bug in it's handling of the "orchestral" staff property.  It puts a heavy accent from the top to the bottom of the system if any staff has the orchestral property and a finial only on the top staff and then only if that staff is flagged orchestral. 

     The correct behavior is to put a heavy accent on and only on each staff that is orchestral, and put a top finial at the join between an accented staff and an unaccented or nonexistant staff above and a bottom finial at the join between an accented staff and an unaccented or nonexistant staff below.  The only way I have found to get around this problem is to print pages, scan them, and paste in the accents and finials graphically. 

     This one problem alone makes NoteWorthy nearly useless as a serious printing program, despite all the added prettyness from version 1, and is listed as fixed in version 2.  So where is the fix?

Re: Break barlines

Reply #7 –
Ahh, a collossal cave player...  ;)

G'day.  Welcome to the best little forum on the net.

If I may mildly disagree with you, what you describe isn't a bug - it is , rather, a design issue.

A bug is an unintentional thing - something isn't behaving as designed.  A design issue is something that is functioning as designed but that design is somehow flawed.

In this case, we don't get Orchestral staff handling in the manner that we expect.  I agree that is is something that needs to be improved/corrected but to call it a bug is misleading.
I plays 'Bones, crumpets, coronets, floosgals, youfonymums 'n tubies.

Re: Break barlines

Reply #8 –
What's a finial?

Re: Break barlines

Reply #9 –
A finial is a little curl or decoration.  In this case the little curve up or down, as the case may be at the top and bottom of the emphasized portion of an orchestrally grouped set of staves.

And sorry, there is a standard for music notation, and any deviation from it is a bug in a program that purports to produce printed music.  This is not some newfangled precussion clef on which there can still be disagreement, but something that has been set for centuries.  An error in the design is still just as much a bug as a typo.

Re: Break barlines

Reply #10 –
<bg> I stand by my comment - a bug is unintentional - the results we are getting are intentional - not a bug.

I'm happy to agree to disagree :)  I'm also a pedant at times ;)
I plays 'Bones, crumpets, coronets, floosgals, youfonymums 'n tubies.

Re: Break barlines

Reply #11 –
I'm not. I am merely pedandic.
cheers,
Rob.

Re: Break barlines

Reply #12 –
Mr. Pardy, are you one of the NoteWorthy developers that you can say what was intended?  As a lifelong software developer, I have never before heard of the position that an intended mistake is not a bug, only an unintended one.

Can we please hear from the development team?  With the way this product is progressing it seems there isn't one.  (Check out, for example, ISIS from the Audine group for freeware that gets new and improved features on literally a weekly basis.)

Re: Break barlines

Reply #13 –
Many of us would like the exact feature you describe.  Yet although we haven't gotten it, we still use NWC because we like its design and flexibility.  Also, Eric (NoteWorthy Online) does not usually post on feature requests.  Also, it is quite possible that Eric is the only developer.

Re: Break barlines

Reply #14 –
G'day bidderxyzzy,
I already said I'm happy to agree to disagree, I don't want to get into a flame war here - have it what ever way you want.

I plays 'Bones, crumpets, coronets, floosgals, youfonymums 'n tubies.
 

Re: Break barlines

Reply #15 –
When implementing bug fixes, features and such, faced with an overload of wishes, I myself sometimes adapt one of the following strategies:
1. Don't care about priority. Get ten items off the list A.S.A.P. That makes the remainder more overseeable.
2. The priority of an item is first divided by its complexity. The result is the real priority to act on.

Strategy 2. would explain why slurs have never been fixed so far. For NWC2, a whole new algorithm was devised an implemented. Throwing all that overboard (and coming up with a good replacement, to everybody's liking, while not offending those who have cleverly circumvented the current behaviour...!) would be a major task. So, even with a high 'sec' priority, the effective or real priority is low. But who knows, it may at one point emerge as The Answer To Our Main Issue, the answer this time not being 42.

cheers,
Rob.