Shortcuts for changing text colour

• May 8, 2024 - 10:51

I like to add colours to text for the stickings (like fingerings) in the keyboard percussion samples I make for my students. Typically Blue for Left and Red for Right. I use four stick markings for this: 1,2,3 and 4. This is for vibraphone or marimba, four mallet playing. So for left hand mallet (1+2), I colour them Blue, right hand mallets (3+4), I colour them Right.

Manually changing each entry involves clicking the text above the notes, clicking "Appearance" under Properties, Clicking "Colour" (Which opens another window) then clicking a (Custom) colour. That's 4 clicks to change colour for a single test entry. Copy and Paste doesn't seem to preserve the colour.

I believe I can set as default colour and then go through a whole piece, but often working out stickings is a more linear process, working out as you go.

Q1. Is there a way to have colour options remain visible as a floating menu? Or in palettes?
Q2. Is there a keyboard shortcut to change a text selection to a (default) colour?

Advice is appreciated.

Attachment Size
Sample of coloure stickings.png 73.7 KB

Comments

• May 8, 2024 - 17:11

I also use colour a lot in my scores and eventually wrote a plugin to help with my preferred formatting as I couldn't find any shortcuts. You could use its code to make your own plugin. Another way is to copy/paste items that already have the required colour.

See https://musescore.org/en/project/tab-tools

TabTools150.png

It stays open as a floating palette.

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• May 8, 2024 - 18:51

If your example is representative of your colour coding then you could make a floating palette with the numbers 1-4 in both red and blue, plus a red R and a blue L. Duplicate these for above vs. below and you will have all of your symbols available with a single click.

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• May 9, 2024 - 10:04

This looks perfect for my needs! I'm not really a coder, but I can lean into something long enjoy to make it work (MS, GIMP). I have some questions:

  1. Your TAB tool is a text modifier correct? I wouldn't use it for guitar TABs at all.
  2. It seems to be for Musescore 3.0. I'm on MS 4.0. Are there any issues around installing it for MS 4.0?

Thans for the reply!

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• May 9, 2024 - 10:18
  1. It's a colour, velocity and duration modifier and is not TAB specific - but it does not add text! Oops! (See 3)
  2. I don't use MS4, (too many missing functions for my workflow), so I don't know its plugin API.
  3. Here's a really simple plugin which actually does add text (to make TAB bold which cannot be done from standard TAB formatting options) and it clearly shows how to construct texts and add them to a score:

https://musescore.org/en/project/tab-bold

You may later want to add some options to change the number or letter without touching the colour and without adding a second text to the same note, or to change the colour without changing the text.

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