hide cautionary clefs, keys and time signature

Thanks Rinaldo.

I may have the wrong handle on flows, but I see them as natural breaks. So - songs in a collection of songs. Movements in a symphony. Different scenes within a musical etc. Which is pretty much what Dorico says:

Flows are separate spans of music within your project, for example, movements or songs.

I don’t see flows as a dozen or so lines of text and a few bars of music. For me, the appeal of flows was that they accommodated your whole project. I appreciate there will be an upper limit to that but in this instance we’re talking about a ridiculously low limit just to get around an issue of not being able to hide cautionary symbols.

I don’t want to make too much of an issue of this. Dorico is developing very nicely. But Daniel did ask (some time ago on this thread) for examples and I genuinely think this is a valid example. Dorico isn’t just notation - it’s also text and notation. And the issue with text is that it naturally provides its own form of separation, rendering cautionary symbols etc. unnecessary and invaid.

Daniel -

Having the ability to selectively hide items has been widely discussed in several varying contexts. I could be mistaken (it happens on a regular basis :slight_smile: ) - and at the risk of speaking for other folks - but AFAICT the consensus opinion amongst your user community is that while we all respect and support the desire to keep Dorico semantically consistent, having a single mechanism to selectively display/hide any item is useful in so many differing situations that it overrides semantics. To make an imperfect analogy, it’s the Swiss Army Knife of features.

I respectfully suggest that the wishes of the user community be respected and - if not too difficult to implement - this S******s-like feature be added:

[Hide | Display] [Parts | Full Scores | Both]

or something like that. . . . .

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Dorico also says: Flows are separate spans of music that are completely independent in musical content.

See (Flows in Dorico)

One might quibble about the inclusion of the word “completely”, but I think this latter definition is a good one, and it is fundamental to the Dorico philosophy: all the cases above where users have asked for the ability to suppress cautionaries involve independent musical content, either because they are extracts from different pieces for a didactic work, or because they are separate sections (cues) of a film score.

An alternative approach would be to use a simpler program for printing a page of scales or whatever. Sibelius does this quite readily.

I seriously doubt that I would want to write an essay on a musical topic in Dorico, interspersing it with musical examples, and expecting to achieve this in one flow without cautionaries creeping in at the end of my music examples. I could solve the problem by using a new flow for each musical example, and that would be legitimate according to the above definition; but I would actually find it more appropriate to format the text of my essay with a program like Word (or better) and to embed the musical texts as separate graphics files.

Separate cues in film scores would also seem to lend themselves natually to the concept of separate flows.

As has been pointed out, it is quite possible to define a key command to start a new flow, so doing so doesnt seem to be that onerous a task.

David

I have a few good reasons for not wanting to start a new flow for these. Here’s one:

Flow 1
Musical number + immediate playoff in a different key

Flow 2
Musical number + playoff in a different key after 3 minutes of dialogue

Flow 1 I would like a cautionary, Flow 2 definitely not.

I don’t want to make the playoff Flow 3 for an ad hoc notational item, because that spoils the very useful organisation of flows.

Steve,

That’s where I would call “Flow 3” “Flow 2a”. It could be a matter of semantics, but in respect, I see your point.

I’m with musicmaven on this one. In the scenario “Musical number + playoff in a different key after 3 minutes of dialogue” I’d certainly go for Flow 2 and Flow 2a, and I might even use one of the wildcards attached to Flow 2a for the dialogue cue between the two numbers.

Bear in mind that a) we’ve been promised a better way of allowing new flows to start on the same page WITH all of their “front matter” and b) the advised method of adding a (continuous) coda to a movement/song is to use a separate flow.

The only reason I can see for going down the Flow 2 and Flow 2a route is that it avoids a need for cautionaries - I can’t see any other reason for doing it. The downside is that a flow is no longer always an independent piece, it can also be one piece made into two, or more sections, purely to appear correct.

I remember a brief conversation I had with Daniel before Dorico was launched. The subject was merging Word Processing and Music Notation. He told me that it was an objective (I’m fairly sure he may also have said long-term) for Dorico. To be honest, I think they’ve made more than a fair crack of achieving that from the start. There’s a huge amount you can do already - and it looks great and is easy to work with.

Merging Word Processing with Music Notation isn’t a niche thing. Away from all the scores and parts, there are thousands of textbooks out there that mix the two together. Most of them are hundreds of pages long. Some of them are centuries old. And as far as I know, all of them organise themselves into chapters - that’s their way of defining “independence” within their work.

On the surface, separating content into flows may not seem unduly onerous. But if you have a chapter separated into twenty flows, and you have twenty chapters in your book - the amount of flows in your work is, being blunt, ridiculous.

As I said before, I don’t see this as in any way urgent. As david-p has said, one can already do this by using two separate programs (which I have, often). But it would be better, and so much easier, to do it in one.

Mine was just an example…I have plenty of others.
After, 2a, I’d also have 2b, 2c…2j etc. It’s normal to have a hundred or more separate cues, some need cautionaries, some don’t.
But I don’t want 100 flows–maybe 20-30 for scenes or major numbers.
Dorico will never semantically understand extra-musical considerations.

Dorico is missing a trick here.

Merging Word Processing with Music Notation isn’t a niche thing. Away from all the scores and parts, there are thousands of textbooks out there that mix the two together. Most of them are hundreds of pages long. Some of them are centuries old. And as far as I know, all of them organise themselves into chapters - that’s their way of defining “independence” within their work.

BUT…

Using the criterion of independence for both genres exposes a philosophical and semantic incompatibility between a musical project and a text project. If a musical Flow in Dorico is defined as an independent piece of music, and a textual flow is defined as a chapter, then any work which comprises text separated by music or music separated by text is actually a mixture of two different types of flow which will fight each for supremacy.

David

I just don’t see the problem with having 100+ flows in a project. In fact, I’ve just dealt with a project that had 105 flows, and Dorico handled it fine, albeit slightly slowly. The developers freely admit they’ve got more optimisation to do.

There’s no technical problem of 100 flows, but there is an organisational loss.

I agree with the “organizational loss” idea. My wish is to have a way to group flows together, so you could have a “Chapter 1” group of flows, and a “Chapter 2” group of flows, or you could have an “Act 1, Scene 3” group. Doing this would be easier to navigate where you need to go, instead of looking for Chapter 3 example 21, when you had chapter 1 example 21, and not to mention possibly Chapter 2.

Robby

DAWs are going in the direction of more organisation with track folders and collapsible structures.
At the moment my organisation for a project like this is in the mac finder. I’d love this not to be the case.
If flows could be put into folders (that appeared as meta-flows) it would be great for many things, but I would still rather click on a time signature and just hide the cautionary.

Hi all of you …
I took the time reading all your comments on hiding clefs, keys and time signatures and it seems to me like a “big” issue. Seeing all those wishes and needs it’s already way over that simple question: “why should we need the hiding” …
Actually I’m missing some sort of “ok, we think about that”, from the dorico software designers.
Because dorico is meant to be the most flexible music-notation software nowadays. As I mentioned earlier in this topic, I really do need the hiding, because I would have to deal with hundreds of flows …

Jürg

+1 as well!

+1 YES.

Agree!!!

+1 I think its important that the team really and truly try to understand the users’ needs. This is a golden opportunity to work WITH the users (and not preach at them like some other notation programs). I am 100% excited and supportive of this cool new program, but coming from Finale is a nightmare for me. Honestly. The simplicity of right-clicking something and having the option to show or hide is a basic function of a notation program which does NOT interrupt the “flow” of creativity, and while I think that Dorico’s Flows are truly an awesome, nay: brilliant, way to have multiple movements within one document (like Digital Performer has multiple sequences easily contained within one file- which is a game changer for those of us who need to write larger works with many pieces in them, etc), I see it as a forced work-around for something here, that really seems inelegant and overly obtuse. I can’t imagine this method lasting for long, or many composers putting up with it. I truly hope that changes.

Completely agree. One of the major (pun intended) things that pulled me in to buying Dorico was the beauty of “Flow” as movements. BUT- If I have 46 flows in the first movement, and 132 flows in the slow movement, and 76 flows in the last movement- well, the beauty is gone, and I have to figure out where each flow ends a movement and starts another? Since I’m still new, forgive me if I seem to misunderstand this- but I find it really and truly awkward and anti-intuitive from a creation point of view. I used to write works by hand neatly, then make a copy, then cut them into strips to position them better and hand-draw various other things around the staves. Came out looking pretty good, but, man oh man I’m Happy those days are long gone. This feels like that to me.

Greetings, I already cannot figure out for the life of me how to get past a seemingly VERY simple issue: I had a simple phrase which ended with a half note. I decided to copy and paste it (so I would maybe change stuff after), and then decided to delete the half note at the end of the first phrase- which gave me a half rest. OK, so far so good. But I want to delete the half-rest, and essentially elide the first and second phrases- so I did the “EDIT> Remove Rests” thing, and then there was a gap (see graphic). I tried to select the music following, and move it to the left by a 1/2 note, but can’t figure it out. I feel embarrassed, since I am a long time notator…