Creating a Dotted Whole Note in the Text Toolbar Keyboard

• Aug 27, 2014 - 03:15

I need to do a half-note = dotted whole note between two measures (I'm transcribing a Renaissance piece), and the text toolbar keyboard gives us just about everything but a whole note. It doesn't give dots either. I've tried going to other fonts, inserting from Word (which sometimes works)--nothing. I can insert the half-note and the = sign, but not the dotted whole note. Gratefully accept any help. It's between bars 29-30. The reverse happens between bars 25-36.

Sharon G.

Attachment Size
Pulchra_es.mscz 10.58 KB

Comments

Instead, whether in Note Entry mode or not, press the letter z. A popup menu appears which provides many symbols including both a whole note and a dot, which can be manipulated onscreen to produce a dotted whole note.

Attachment Size
Pulchra_es-dmacaulay.mscz 2.97 KB

FWIW, the text palette in MuseScore 2.0 Beta 1 *does* include the whole note. Also a "special" space character designed to be the right width to put between note and dot.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

It does put in the needed half-note = dotted whole note, but the lyrics are clumsy, come out in the wrong font (I want Times New Roman 8 points) and won't allow me to permanently change the font size and seems to want to stretch several measures while leaving others just fine. And the local manual won't open. I'll just figure it out, I guess. But I have to say, the new version isn't better, at least from my POV. Thanks everyone for your input. I do appreciate it.

Sharon G.

Attachment Size
Pulchra_es.mscz 10 KB

In reply to by Baystein

Regaridng the 2.0 Beta, I think perhaps you just aren't used to it and havenm't discovered all it can do - it's actually a *lot* better overall.

I opened your file and see that the lyrics are indeed small, but that's only because you scaled your entire score down to be very small - you have the Space setting to only 1.353mm in Layout / Page Settings. That's about 25% smaller than normal. And then you have only 8 point font selected as your lyric text style on top of that - that works out to only just ovr 6pt font. So no wonder it's so small! They are indeed slightly smaller loaded into 2.0 than 1.3, but I suspect that's just a difference in scaling algorithms when you get down to such abnormally small sizes. I suspect 1.3 rounded up to 7pt, thus giving you something rather bigger than you actually asked for, whereas 2.0 is giving you what you actually asked for.

I'll assume for now you really do want your music that small but just want to make the lyrics bigger. In that case, it's supposed to be as simple as right clicking a lyric, Text Style, and upping the size. This would automatically affect all lyrics at once. Much better and easier than 1.3.

However, because your score was originally created in 1.3, your lyrics are "locked in" to the text size you created them with for now. Not sure how to fix that, but it wouldn't affect you creating a new score from scratch. It won't even affect you entering new lyrics into the same score. Try it: go to the piano part, type lyrics into the top staff. By default, you'll get the same 6pt point (your selected 8pt font scaled down to 75%), Now right click a syllable, text style, and up the size to 11 point. Volia, all the lyrics you just entered are the 75% scaled version of 11pt font. Set your scaling back to normal (1.764 space) and you;ll see your lyrics really are 11pt.

So basically, it's only an artifact how of how you created that particular score that causes you to see these artifacts.

Oh, BTW - there is no new manual yet. It's only a beta. Just ask questions on the Technology Preview forum if you have trouble figuring things out.

In reply to by Baystein

:-)

Is the "weird spacing problem" the fact that the very first system of your score seems to either fit six or seven measures on it and flip between those every time you change anything? This *could* be a random chance where the calculated size of the measures was exactly equal to the length of the line but a small difference in rounding anywhere in the calculation would make that seventh measure either fit or not. I've seen the exact same thing happen in 1.3 - about once every thousand systems or so, as you might expect if it really is some sort of roundoff error. However, I sort of think something else is going on here, and that there is a bug in the layout algorithm that your score is exposing. I will file this in the issue tracker so it can be looked at.

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