Fixed position of a custom symbol

• Apr 6, 2020 - 14:53

Hi, I use custom symbols in my tablatures for the plucking direction (UP / DOWN, arrows found in Master Palette). They have the same meaning as down bow and up bow symbols for the violin. The violin symbols are placed above the staff by default. However, I can't find a way how to get the same behavior for my arrows. I always have to move them manually. Can anybody help, please?

symbol position.png

violin symbols.png


Comments

Symbols are attached to individual notes indeed, but if you add those as staff text, using the Special Characters palette, they appear above staff by default. You can drag elements from Special Characters to a custom palette for easier reuse.

In reply to by Shoichi

Not clear what you mean, should work perfectly, and does for me. If you attach your actual score rather than just a picture, we can understand and assist better.

EDIT: Oops, just saw who I was responding to :-). My understanding is the OP wants the symbol to appear not like fingering but like violin bow symbols - always the same height by default.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Marc, that is great, thanks a lot! The only little problem is I can not select all notes that need the symbol and use Ctrl+T > F2 to insert the arrows for all of them. But I can insert just one arrow first, select and copy it, THEN select all applicable notes and press CTRL+V. Problem solved, thanks again! ;-)

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

If I understood you well, I can drag the symbol to a custom palette to add it to the text easier, not just click the symbol and add it to the score, right? (I would like to add more ornament symbols to the ornament palette, but adding symbols from main palette doesn't seem to be the way to do it).

In reply to by filipedfs

It's hard to say if you're talking about the same thing here. What kind of ornament do you mean? The ones actually supported natively by MuseScore are all on the master palette in the Ornaments section, also on the Ornaments palette itself if you click the "More" button at bottom right of the palette. Either can easily be added to the main palette by simply dragging.

If on the other hand you mean some special symbol not already supported, you might find it on the Symbols palette within the master palette, in which case you can drag it to the main palette, but MuseScore won't know how to position it or handle playback. For that you'd need to add it as text. And in that case, you probably want to create a staff text in your score and add the symbol to it using the Special Characters palette, then add the text from the score to the main palette.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Hi Marc, thank you for answering me.

I was writing to you but I decided to be sure the result I was getting was what I thought. Then I realized that I could add a staff text, add the symbol and then drag the text from the score to the palette. And now I achieved what you told us. What I tried to do before was drag the symbol directly from Special Characters to the palette, and that way the symbol behaved just like a symbol and appeared almost in front of the note (although I would be glad to see an option to set symbols to a certain position always if that option doesn't exist yet).

Now I'm looking for a way to create more custom text styles, but so far I wasn't able to find it.

(Off topic: I just translated some strings to Brazilian Portuguese because I thought they were misleading and after I restarted my PC, for other reasons, and opened MuseScore again, for my amusement, they were already there! I am very impressed and thankful for this software. Thank you for your work and all people involved.)

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