Templates 104: Custom Lines

Geek-o-meter: 1️⃣ 2 3

One of the great things about creating your own custom template is that you can make choices regarding the aesthetics of the score and parts, establishing a consistent house style. Reading some of the excellent books and manuals on engraving can provide you with valuable insights into what to look out for. One aspect that can greatly improve the appearance of the score and parts is the design of the octave lines. Consider these two options:

Elaine Gould provides these two options in her book Behind Bars. I would wager that as long as the line is placed correctly either above or below the staff, there is no ambiguity about whether the notes should be played an octave above or below the written pitches. Removing the letters therefore makes the information more concise and tightens the space. This is especially crucial when the line spans only a few notes or needs to be moved to the left of other objects to fit within vertical space constraints.

Let’s make this our default!

Making the Line

I would think this is a given by now, but just to be sure: Open the template you’ve created over the last couple of posts and work from that. Go to ‘Edit Lines’ in the Notations pane and find the ‘Octave Up’ staff line. Let’s create a new line based on this, while keeping the original as a fallback in case we need it.

Remember to rename this to something easily identifiable, like your initials or your favorite animal. For the start of the line, we have the option to either start with nothing, start with text, or start with a symbol. Since we’re feeling fancy, we’ll start with a symbol. Press ‘Select…’ to view the options. We can choose whatever we like, but we really only need the single 8.

With our current settings, the continuation draws more attention to itself than the start of the line.

Luckily, there’s a separate setting for the symbol of the continuation. For that, we turn to ‘8 (for clefs)’:

A smaller-sized octave symbol is perfectly suited as a reminder, since continuations don’t provide new information but simply states what has already been stated. It states the state.

Exit these menus and go to Appearance → Design and Positions. Find the newly created octave line and set the position of the right-hand end a bit more aggressively than the default. Octave lines should end just to the right of the last notehead, which the default setting never does.[^1]

Now you’ve set up your first custom line. If you use it in projects and find you need to tweak any of the settings, you can always check ‘Edit Lines’ and ‘Design and Positions’. If you want to dive deeper, you can also design your own symbols to use, but we’ll save that for another afsnit.

Final Touches

If you plan to use these lines in future projects, go ahead and create custom versions for octave up, octave down, two octaves up, and two octaves down, making a complete set of four useful lines.

Before I say “attach a shortcut, kids!” you might want to create a new plugin. “A new plugin‽” you might scream, but remember Execute Commands? We’ve done this before, so no need to panic. You’ve got this.

With this combination of assigning the octave line and then running the ‘Retract Line Ends’ plugin, you get the added benefit of clean-up if the line ends on a system break. If you create a ‘New Plugin…’ through this window, you can attach a shortcut to it!

And that’s the end of the line!

Footnotes

[^1]: And mine also doesn’t. In hindsight, the distance should be massaged a bit to something like 1.05 spaces to the right.