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Topic: changing staff visibility within a piece (Read 5246 times) previous topic - next topic

changing staff visibility within a piece

I enter choral pieces, and often the voice vary as I progress through the piece - sometimes 4 part, sometimes a single solo line, sometimes with or without accompaniment, sometimes an added dscant or instrumental part.  I really dont want to have a lot of blank staffs full of rests trhoughout my piece.  Does anyone know any way to activate and hide certain staffs as I progress through a piece of music?  Kind of like the "never visible" at a staff level.  (I can hide everything on the staff, but then I just have blank ledger lines showing.)

Re: changing staff visibility within a piece

Reply #1 –
The short answer is "no." The long answer is still "no," but you can do it if you have a lot of patience and a good word processor that can print graphics inline, or a good hypertext editor in which you can position graphics with tables, or a good graphics editor that can....you get the idea. You have to copy images of the score as a full score for the parts where you need all the staves (use print preview/copy), and again with the staves hidden that have long rests in them. Then you cut-and-paste until you get the result you want. Tedious, but it can be managed.

The ability to do this natively has been high on the wish list for a very long time. Maybe someday.....

Cheers,

Bill

Re: changing staff visibility within a piece

Reply #3 –
Hi Rick -

Actually, I haven't tried it with NWC scores, but it's easy to place graphics in hypertext using tables. Seemed like a logical possibility. I have created scores using MS Word in the manner I described. Not much fun, but possible. Hypertext would probably be easier. There's no native page break command in HTML, but there are utilities (such as hscissor) that will add them - or you could simply adjust table size until you got the page breaks in the right places, checking with print preview in your browser.

The easiest way to do this would probably be to use graphics software, such as Faststone, that has a function to stitch two images together vertically. (Not make a panorama - just stitch two separate images together.) Create images of the systems you need and then simply paste them together vertically into page-sized composite images. Again, I haven't tried this, but I see no reason why it wouldn't work.

Bill

Re: changing staff visibility within a piece

Reply #4 –
Hmm, at times I've printed to PDF and then edited the PDF...  Really the same thing as Bill is describing, just a different platform.
I plays 'Bones, crumpets, coronets, floosgals, youfonymums 'n tubies.

Re: changing staff visibility within a piece

Reply #5 –
Ok, I've done much the same thing with IrfanView, which does make panoramas. Slice the pages into indivdual systems, crop out unneeded bits, figure out how much padding between systems and repaginate.

I thought Bill might have found an easy way to move a slur.
Registered user since 1996

Re: changing staff visibility within a piece

Reply #6 –
Quote from: Rick G.
I thought Bill might have found an easy way to move a slur.

Don't we all wish....

Bill

Re: changing staff visibility within a piece

Reply #7 –
Quote
I thought Bill might have found an easy way to move a slur.

Y'know, banks use to use magnetic ink on cheques ("MICR coding" for those who are old like me).

Now, if you fill your printer with magnetic ink, and put a magnet near the printer output tray before the ink has dried, maybe you can drag the slur up to where it belongs...

(Oh, it is getting late, isn't it. Silly season.)