Skip to main content ↑ ↓
Topic: Different number of staffs to be printed in one song (Read 3929 times) previous topic - next topic

Different number of staffs to be printed in one song

Suppose you have a song with multiple staffs, some of these staffs containing tacets. When printing the score, the empty staffs are printed anyway.

Is there any chance to avoid printing parts (!) of a staff, i.e. the printout would contain e.g. an area with two staffs, switching to an area with only one staff and even back to two staffs ?

Thanks for your suggestions !

Thomas Externest

Re: Different number of staffs to be printed in one song

Reply #1 –
That is not an internal capability of NWC 1.75.

But you can accomplish what you want, easily enough. You need to use a program that can open Windows metafiles (WMF). Examples are MS Word and Open Office (recent versions). I have done this for choral music, with instrumental interludes: The instrument is not shown while the choir is singing, since the sheet music is only for the choir.

In NWC, go to Print Preview > Copy to create a metafile, either on the clipboard, or as a saved file. This is a graphic image of the displayed page - just one page at a time. The image can be pasted or opened into the other program, then moved, cropped, or scaled.

If you do it this way, you can combine music from different files. So it is a matter of creating NWC files that show just the amount of staff that you wish to include, when viewed in Print Preview. In many cases, you can switch the visibility of a staff on or off, by using the Contents feature in File > Page setup.

Instead of using Print Preview, you can highlight a portion of your music, and use "Copy Special" to place its image on the clipboard.

When the metafiles are pasted (or opened) into the word processing document, they will call for fonts. NWCV15 (the Noteworthy Composer font for v. 1.75), and any user-special fonts, must be installed in the system. What that means is if you send your document to someone else, they must also have the fonts, unless you make it into a PDF document with fonts embedded.

Re: Different number of staffs to be printed in one song

Reply #2 –
I manually do this by ceating what I call 'workfiles' which are actually different files of the same song. I print them out  later separetly making sure I remove title informations from all except the first page. I'd have to manually create a measure number accordingly on the top system of each workfile. the print out of the different files will eventually look as if they are from the same file, and I'll have appropriate number of stave as I need on each page and none will be the wiser as far as telling how I did this. For play back I later create another file in which I join all the workfiles together.I do wish myself that NWC will eventually find a way do this on its own. My description may not be very clear to you, please indicate if so.

Re: Different number of staffs to be printed in one song

Reply #3 –
It's perfectly clear and entirely reasonable. It's also not terribly difficult to do, except of course that the user interface has to work. Let's just keep the pressure up, and who knows what might happen!

Re: Different number of staffs to be printed in one song

Reply #4 –
Although I'd like to see that feature, I'm not sure how easy it would be, from a user perspective. It would require that the user plan ahead in terms of where the systems break, and so forth. Make a change that causes overflow of a system, and a lot of things would end up in the wrong place.

I suppose the best way to try it would be to allow some number of measures of a staff to be highlighted, with "this portion does not print" as a property, and a color change visible. Then, positioning of system breaks would be the responsibility of the user. It would be even better if the user didn't have to manually place bars and rests in non-printing portions, just to keep things aligned.

Actually, if the desired end effect is a quarto-type printout, or something with graphics and extended text, then it's necessary to copy and paste the music into a word processor anyway. Since just about everyone has a word processor, and already knows how to use it, there's no much of a problem.

Re: Different number of staffs to be printed in one song

Reply #5 –
The idea of setting a section of a staff to non-printing is exactly right, but then I think you make an unnecessary assumption - i.e. none of the non-printing bit should be printed.

Far easier just to say that if a staff on any particular system is specified as non-printing over the entire system, then don't print it.

Any bits which are a mix of printing and non-printing get printed as normal (and indeed as is found in many examples of printed music).

And the rule can be simplisticly applied. It should make no difference whether there is anything actually prinitable or not - that would be up to the user to check.

Re: Different number of staffs to be printed in one song

Reply #6 –
Thank everyone for your suggestions !

Peter is absolutely right : If a staff in a particular system only contains elements not to be printed, why should the staff itself be printed ? If the user wishes so, then this could be realised e.g. by a parameter "Avoid printing empty staffs".

Re: Different number of staffs to be printed in one song

Reply #7 –
Hi Thomas,

is it you, the one and only Thomas Externest? Please read my name backwards... Best wishes from Frankfurt and -thank God- Hamburg soon!

Esnerf