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NWC2 enhancements

Working with NWC2 (I do arrangements of orchestral works for wind instruments band) I have felt a number of times the need for the following enhancements. I'd like to know whether they are foreseen earlier or later.

- Multi-staff (vertical) selection : the possibility to select a set of staves at once. For example, I'd like to select a section of orchestral work in order to delete, move or copy it. Making it staff by staff is slow and error prone.

- Better management of multiple void measures. When managing a single instrument score it should be beneficial to have a mean to include repetition numbers for multiple void measures. Using a simple text on top of a single pause measure obtains the visual effect, but the measure numbers, which are very useful when directing an orchestral work, get disaligned. It should be needed some "special" text which takes into account the repetition number and sum it to the measure number in order to avoid the disalignment.

- Management of ' | % | ' measures in order to make repetitions of the same measure a number of times with reduced space should be very beneficial especially for wind band booklets where the space is limited.

- The current implementation of musical ornaments is limited to small notes (appoggiatura/acciaccatura), while it should be nice to have also things like trillo (mainly), mordente, gruppetto, and so on. I understand that there are a lot of ways to execute them, but maybe it should be possible to provide some default implementation, with the possibility for the user to customise it as needed, providing a personalised template. Using text plus hidden notes is possible today but it's slow and at the end of the day not practical for a real usage.

- It seems that only triplets are managed. It should be useful to have also other numbers of group of notes managed : 2, 5, 6 (very frequent!) at least.

Thanks and best regards
Francesco

   

Re: NWC2 enhancements

Reply #1 –
G'day Francesco.  Welcome to the club ;)

Quote from: francesco_lazzeri –
- Multi-staff (vertical) selection : the possibility to select a set of staves at once. For example, I'd like to select a section of orchestral work in order to delete, move or copy it. Making it staff by staff is slow and error prone.

This would be very nice, but it is unavailable.  Given how NWC works I suspect it is unlikely to eventuate.  HOWEVER...  If you explore the User Tools facility, there is a tool available from the Scripto (www.nwc-scriptorium.org) called "Cut/Copy and Paste Measures" (http://nwc-scriptorium.org/nwc2scripts.html) that can facilitate what you want.  For more info on user tools check out some of the other links you'll find there.

Quote
- Better management of multiple void measures. When managing a single instrument score it should be beneficial to have a mean to include repetition numbers for multiple void measures. Using a simple text on top of a single pause measure obtains the visual effect, but the measure numbers, which are very useful when directing an orchestral work, get disaligned. It should be needed some "special" text which takes into account the repetition number and sum it to the measure number in order to avoid the disalignment.

Again, user tools...  If you create the score as normal, including whole rests in bars to keep the numbering straight, then you can add a "multi measure" rest.  Whilst it can be done manually, there is a user tool called "Multi Bar Rest" that makes life much easier.  It requires that you install a font that supports the additional characters necessary. 
These are:
  • Boxmarks
  • Boxmark2
  • any of my *Dings fonts

Available from the Scripto: http://nwc-scriptorium.org/helpful.html

Quote
- Management of ' | % | ' measures in order to make repetitions of the same measure a number of times with reduced space should be very beneficial especially for wind band booklets where the space is limited.

This can be achieved in the printed version using characters from the fonts mentioned above and placed as text.  Unfortunately for the playback to be right you still need to place the notes.  They can be on a separate, hidden staff OR in the "real" staff but with visibility set to Print|Never.  The second method looks untidy in the editor but will print fine.

Quote
- The current implementation of musical ornaments is limited to small notes (appoggiatura/acciaccatura), while it should be nice to have also things like trillo (mainly), mordente, gruppetto, and so on. I understand that there are a lot of ways to execute them, but maybe it should be possible to provide some default implementation, with the possibility for the user to customise it as needed, providing a personalised template. Using text plus hidden notes is possible today but it's slow and at the end of the day not practical for a real usage.

Concur, except that I think it is practical for real usage - I do it all the time...

Quote
- It seems that only triplets are managed. It should be useful to have also other numbers of group of notes managed : 2, 5, 6 (very frequent!) at least.

This is so.  N-tuplets is a long standing wish.  (NB sextuplets can be "fudged" by using triplets)

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

Re: NWC2 enhancements

Reply #2 –
I have just two things to add to Lawry's (always) excellent reply:

1) On N-tuplets: this subject has been discussed often in the forum. While I strongly concur that native N-tuplets would be a good idea, there are some fairly simple workarounds available which create adequate ones. There are a couple of current threads on this subject going on right now in the "General Discussion" section that you might want to check. Basically, you use invisible time signatures and tempo changes to fake the N-tuplet, along with a text entry indicating the number of notes in the tuplet.

2) On multiple-measure rests: mechanically, what is needed for these is simply to create the right number of measures of rest and then mark all the barlines and rests "visibility: never." A text entry then does the rest. Be sure that you check the "preserve width" box in the "expression placement" part of the properties dialog.

Hope this helps. One of the things you will learn to love about NWC is the many ways the program makes it easy to create workarounds for the features it doesn't have yet.

Bill

Re: NWC2 enhancements

Reply #3 –
To add to what Lawrie and William have already said:
About multibar rests:
To get very specific, the script is available at http://nwc-scriptorium.org/nwc2scripts_mbr.html
In order for it to work, you must have first installed the User Tool Starter Kit.

And the fonts Lawrie recommended are essentially the de facto fonts for ornamental stuff.  The various fonts have slightly different purposes: BoxMarks and BoxMarks 2 fit in with the default NWC2 notation font, whereas Lawrie's excellent *Dings fonts are designed to be a complete package, complete with replacement notation and text fonts.  There are also many other useful fonts there.

About ornaments like trills, we do mostly just have text with hidden notes, but we use fonts like BoxMarks and *Dings for trills, rather than having to use things like tr~~~~~~~~  We do think it is quite practical.

And for discussion on n-tuplets, see https://forum.noteworthycomposer.com/?topic=3061.0 or a somewhat shorter summary at https://forum.noteworthycomposer.com/?topic=6500.msg44225#msg44225

Re: NWC2 enhancements

Reply #4 –
Quote
1) On N-tuplets: this subject has been discussed often in the forum. While I strongly concur that native N-tuplets would be a good idea, there are some fairly simple workarounds available which create adequate ones. There are a couple of current threads on this subject going on right now in the "General Discussion" section that you might want to check. Basically, you use invisible time signatures and tempo changes to fake the N-tuplet, along with a text entry indicating the number of notes in the tuplet.

N-tuplets have been in the wishlist since the first year of the private betatest of NWC2, so that's 5 or 6 years now.  I imagine there's a technical problem with programming it, and at the program's price, I am not complaining that we don't have them.

The workarounds are do-able, althought can be problematic if you change the tempo in one staff to accommodate an n-tuplet.  A triplet in NWC only affects the staff that has the triplet, not the others, but the workarounds for the other n-tuplets will affect all staffs.  Sometimes that is extremely unwelcome, for instance where you're writing someone's fluid trancribed solo with several sextuplets or quintuplets or duplets, against the band's "strict time" parts.

Living with the workarounds, we still need a native NWC2 drawing tool to draw the appropriate n-tuplet figure (hooked line broken with a numeral), at the appropriate slope for the grouped notes, and for various other lines or curves as well.  
 

Re: NWC2 enhancements

Reply #5 –
I changed the 3's to 6'es in sextuplets using digital whiteout, overlaid with the number 6.
Like so:

!NoteWorthyComposerClip(2.5,Single)
|Text|Text:" "|Font:User1|Pos:33|Color:7
|Text|Text:"    6"|Font:User4|Pos:27
!NoteWorthyComposerClip-End

where User font 1 is NWC2STDA, size 28, and font 4 is Times, size 8, Italic. Works for me. The positions need to be varied to your needs.
The character of the first Text item is character code 157.
(This is, actually, easier than it looks. ;-) )

Re: NWC2 enhancements

Reply #6 –
Mind you, the positioning does not always work correctly. And then it's Kludge City Revisited to get proper results.