Is there a way to precisely adjust the heights of INDIVIDUAL hairpins, fermata, etc?
I write choral music and often have more than one part per voice, which means I generally have note flags pointing up even when they're above the middle line on the staff. For high soprano lines and other high notes, this gets in the way of hairpins, dynamics marks, fermatas, staff text and other ornaments above the staff. Even if I flip the note flags, a high A can still get in the way of stuff above the staff. I find that if I simply click and drag ornaments to new positions, the score ends up looking sloppy and inconsistent.
I know you can set the standard height of things like hairpins in the Style menu, but I don't need to have all my hairpins a half-inch above the staff. I know you can also adjust the length of hairpins using the Ctl - ArrowKey combination, which creates a much more consistent length adjustment. Is there a way to adjust the height (vertical positioning) of individual ornaments without clicking and dragging?
Thanks for the help!
Comments
You can select several of them and change their positions using the inspector all at once. If you are selective about the hairpins you select, you can minimize the number of edits you need to make.
In reply to You can select several of… by mike320
Dope! I'd never used the Inspector before; very useful tool. That's exactly what I needed. Thank you.
Automatic placement should be handling at least some of this for you, well, automatically :-). If you use the Format / Style / Hairpin to set placement above and a reasonable default offset, then any places where the notes extend above the staff, the hairpins should be automatically moving to avoid the notes. But, it's true they won't necessarily be aligned with each other. So, the Inspector can indeed be the way to go; you can multi-select the hairpins you want aligned and give them all the same offset.