Graphics Lines & Tuplet pane

Graphics, Lines and Tuplet Pane

If the Music Images panel is not already visible on your screen, choose Music Images Panel... from the Tools menu to make it visible.
If the Graphics & Lines pane (which contains the tabs: Graphics, Lines and Tuplets) is not visible in the Music Images Panel, select Graphics & Lines from the Available Panes pull-down menu at the top of the Music Images Panel.
Choose between the three tabs in the Graphics & Lines pane to view controls for Graphics, Lines or Tuplets.

Graphics Tab

The Graphics pane is used for setting the attributes of the the NoteAbilityPro graphics objects: lines, rectangles, ovals, curves as well as the color of text.

The three color wells hold the current color (or grayscale) for:

filled rectangles or ovals
lines and frames for rectangles or ovals
text

To change the colors in the wells, use the Show Colors... item in the Format menu or click on the border of one of the colour wells. Once you have selected your color in the Color panel, drag the color and drop it in one the wells in this pane.

The Graphics pane includes radio buttons to set whether rectangles and ovals are framed only, filled only or framed and filled. There is also a check box Has Fixed Size which allows the size of rectangles and ovals to be fixed so they don't change their shape as the rhythmic spine is adjusted. The Has Fixed Size setting must be made before the image is drawn. In the example below, the rectangle has fixed size, while the oval does not. Compressing or stretching the measure will distort the oval, but not the rectangle.

To change the characteristics of an existing graphic object, select the image, choose the desired settings in the Graphics pane and click the Change Graphics button.

- All new graphics are drawn using the settings in this pane. If you change the settings in order to alter an exising graphic image, you may want to revert the settings before adding more images.

- It is possible to control whether a graphic object is drawn before or after another image by changing its voice with the Change Voice buttons since the voices on each measure are drawn one after another. In the example below white rectangles are used to erase part of the staff. The white rectangles are set to voice 1 and the lines are set to voice 2 This ensures that the lines will be drawn after the erasure (white) rectangle.

Lines Tab

NoteAbility supports 20 different line types, each of which can be solid or dashed, can be drawn at any line thickness and colour (the colour is set in the Graphics tab), and can be set to any point size (using the Image Size slider in the Image Attributes pane.)

To enter lines in your score:

Select the line type using the slider on the right side of the pane - two examples of the line are shown in the white rectangle
Set the line width by using the Line Width slider.
Select whether you want the line to be solid or dashed (there are 3 different dash sizes)

Draw lines using the Line tool from the NoteAbilityPro Tool palette - lines will appear on the score using all the characteristics you have just set.

To change the attributes of lines that have already been added to your score, select the lines on the score (using the Selection or Select Score tools), then choose the new line type, line width, whether they are to be solid or dashed, and click on the Change Line Type button.

To change only the line width of selected lines, set a new line width and use the Change Line Width button.

It is also possible to change the image size of a line by selecting it, choosing a new image size in the Image Attributes pane and clicking on the Set Size button. Changing the image size (or point size) of a line has different effects depending on the line type. Generally, the size of extended lines or the size of the arrow head is altered with different image sizes. The line thickness is not altered since that attribute is set with the Line Width slider. In the example below, the four different line types are shown at 24, 36 and 48 point sizes:

Tuplets Tab

The tuplet tab is used for creating nested tuplets (tuplets within tuplets.) In a situation where you need a tuplet such as a triplet within another tuplet such as a triplet or a quintuplet, you can use this panel to build your nested tuplet. The figure below shows an example of a nested tuplet.

In this example, the base tuplet is an eighth note quintuplet (5 eighth notes in the time of 4 eighth notes) and the nested tuplet is a triplet where 3 notes appear in the time of 1 of the base units. Before creating nested tuplets, you need to determine the base tuplet (i.e. the number of notes that will appear in the time of how many of those notes, and what rhythmic value the base tuplet will have. For the nested tuplet, you need to know how many notes should appear in place of how many of the base tuplets.

Here are a few more examples:

Base tuplet	Base Duration	Nested Value
3 in the time of 2	Quarter note	3 in the time of 1 base unit
7 in the time of 6	Eighth note	5 in the time of 2 base units
8 in the time of 7	Eighth note	5 in the time of 1 base units

The procedure for creating nested tuplets is as follows:

Enter the values for base tuplet, nested tuplet and base rhythmic unit by clicking on the up and down arrows on the panel. The panel below shows a base value of 5 in the time of 4 eighth notes and a nested value of 3 in the time of 1 of the base units. The values at the bottom of the panel show the actual duration values of the nested tuplet (which are 15 sixteenth notes in the time of 8 sixteenth notes).
If you are entering notes with a duration of the base tuplet, click on the Set button beside the Base Tuplet. When you do this, the appropriate command will be entered in the Command field and the tuplet setting on the top of the score window will be set automatically. These values can be altered if needed (for dotted notes or tied notes or if you want to enter rests) but in many instances you can use these values to insert the notes. In the example below four eighth note (quintuplets) were entered.
When you want to enter note belonging to the nested tuplet, click on the Set button beside the Nested Tuplet, and the appropriate command and tuplet setting will be passed to the score. Again, these values can be altered if needed. In this example, the tuplet values 15 in the time of 8 with the command "s" for sixteenth note were passed to the score. When three sixteenth notes are entered the results are as follows:
The beaming and tuplet grouping still needs to be corrected -- the music is intially entered with the tuplet values that were used (5 : 4 && 15 : 8). Select the entire collection of notes and use the Beam Notes command (Command-b) to create a single beam group.
Finally, select the notes again and click on the Form Nested Tuplet button located on the Tuplet pane. The two levels of tuplets should be calculated and displayed.

Each tuplet can be adjusted and (if desired) the ratio can be displayed and the bracket hidden.

- Nested tuplets can only be formed in situations where the second tuplet (i.e. the nested tuplet) is completely contained within the base tuplet -- it is not possible to form nested tuplets across multiple base tuplets.

- When copying and pasting nested tuplets, make sure you use the Paste Exact operation (Command-Shift-V) in order that the nested tuplet gets recreated. If you use Paste (Command-v) you may have to reselect the notes and click on the Form Nested Tuplet button to recreate the nested tuplet.

Menu items

The pull down menu located at the top-right corner of this pane refer to Import Graphics - these are graphics files that have been dragged and dropped onto the score or inserted using the Image Library Panel.

Bring Import Graphic To Front	bring selected import graphics in front of staves and other music images
Send Import Graphic To Back	send selected import graphics behind staves and other music images
Hide/Show Import Graphic	hide or show the selected import graphics

The Bring To Front and Send To Back menu items refer only to Imported PDF, EPS, TIFF, JPEG, PICT, or GIF files. You can use these buttons to cause the graphic images to be drawn (and printed) before or after score is drawn. The example below shows an imported TIFF image (a stop sign) which is placed once in front of the score, once behind the score. The third copy of this image has been hidden by selecting the image and clicking on the Hide/Show Import Graphic menu. This image will appear when the document is printed.

- Import graphic images can be made global so that they extract with every extracted part by selecting the image and choosing the Modify/Text/Make Text Global menu item.