User manual

882
Designing your score: additional techniques
Breaking bar lines
Breaking bar lines
Sometimes you may not want a bar line to stretch all the way across a grand staff. If
this is the case, you have the possibility to “break it”.
Manually
You can break the bar lines in one grand staff or in several grand staves and re-
connect them.
Breaking bar lines in one grand staff
1. Select the Erase tool.
2. Click on a bar line connecting the two staves.
All bar lines between these two staves (except the first and last) are broken. To
break the first or last bar line in a grand staff, you need to click directly on these.
Before and after splitting the bar lines between two staves.
Breaking bar lines in several grand staves
If you hold down [Alt]/[Option] and click on a bar line as described above, the
corresponding bar lines are broken in all following grand staves.
Re-connecting broken bar lines
If you have broken the bar lines, you can use the Glue tool to connect them again.
1. Select the Glue tool.
2. Click on one of the bar lines in the staff above the broken bar lines.
All bar lines between these staves in this grand staff are connected.
• To re-connect bar lines in several grand staves, hold down [Alt]/[Option] and click
with the Glue tool.
The bar lines between the corresponding staves are connected in all following
grand staves.
Automatically
If you have added brackets for some staves on the Layout page of the Score Settings
dialog (see
“Adding brackets and braces” on page 878), you can have bar lines
broken between each bracketed “section”, giving a clearer indication of which staves
belong together:
1. Open the Score Settings dialog from the Score menu and, on the Project page,
select the “Notation Style” subpage.
2. In the Bar Lines section, locate and activate the “Break Bar Lines with Brackets”
option.
• The option Break Last Brackets determines whether the breaking of bar lines
should also apply to the bar line at the end of each row.