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'Sib. 7.1.3: Guillotine Crop Marks above and below staves'

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Sib. 7.1.3: Guillotine Crop Marks above and bel... - AndyZ, 26 Jul 04:51PM

Re: Sib. 7.1.3: Guillotine Crop Marks above and... - Jim Druckenmiller, 26 Jul 10:59PM

Re: Sib. 7.1.3: Guillotine Crop Marks above and... - Wim Hoogewerf, 27 Jul 09:31PM

Re: Sib. 7.1.3: Guillotine Crop Marks above and... - AndyZ, 28 Jul 08:32AM

Sib. 7.1.3: Guillotine Crop Marks above and below staves
Posted by AndyZ - 26 Jul 04:51PM

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I hope one of you clever people can help me.

I want to chop up my printed Sibelius page and paste the individual 4-Bar phrases onto cards (it's for a game).

I really want each strip to be exactly the same width and length after being guillotined, and so need crop marks of some sort to guide my chopping.

Is there a way to add a horizontal and if possible a vertical line AT EXACTLY THE SAME RELATIVE POSITION ON EACH STAVE. Say where the third ledger line above and below the stave might go vertically, and just before and after the bar line horizontally.

I have tried boxes and created lines, but they do not seem to position themselves reliably.

Any ideas please ? Might I have to upgrade to Sib 8 ?

many thanks in advance.

Andy

Re: Sib. 7.1.3: Guillotine Crop Marks above and below staves
Posted by Jim Druckenmiller - 26 Jul 10:59PM (edited 02 Oct 02:04AM)

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Hi,

using crop marks to guide your chopping will be less reliable than having a fence or stop set into place so as to flush up your card stock to a hard stop at some place on the cutting board platform.

I don't mean to critique your methods here. but you did use the word 'Exact', and I'd hate to have one of the players accuse you of placing a marked deck into the game. As the game designer you're already going to be accused of bending the rules to suit yourself, and scrutinized about many other things, so. . .

IDEAS:

for marks vertical to the staff (as in your ledger line idea) this is fairly easy... You could use a symbol of some variety and place them where needed.

Once in place, at some point you can do an 'Advanced Search' for that particular symbol throughout the entire score, and while they are all selected as a group, go into the inspector and assign them all the same 'Y' value at one time. . . whatever value you happen to like.

Sibelius uses the center staff line (of a 5 line staff) as Y = 0 (if I recall correctly)... So positive numbers will push up, and of course negative number will push down.

The 'X' value in this case will be a little more tricky because that's based relative to where the symbol attached itself horizontally—which note position (in which measure). But it can still work—you'll just have to pay attention to what it's being attached to. and the more consistent that attachment point becomes the more reliably it will work as a vertical mark in line with the barlines.

But having said that, I'm also tempted to suggest that it might be easiest to reference all of the vertical marks (and opposite measure points) from the initial barline in each system. That of course takes it's positioning from the Document Setup menu and the Page and Staff Margins therein.

Take Care, and Good Luck with your project,

Jim

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attempt to summarize...

Experiment with using the X/Y Offset values of the inspector window... as they apply to a symbol of your choice.

an Advanced Search of the entire score, can help select all of the symbols at once.

... and Leaving Room for improvement...

Getting your hands dirty and editing or creating a new symbol would probably be even better to do. You'll be given the opportunity to determine exactly where you want the insertion point to be. and there's a little graphical preview to show how things will turn out.

You can still apply the x/y offset from the inspector over any of your custom symbol edits. so there's a lot of flexibility here.

Also note that the 'Tab' key, and 'Shift' + 'Tab' keys quickly moves you back an forth between the x/y value boxes in the inspector. While doing so, Sibelius likes to provide a preview of these results as you move in-between value boxes. So this is a big time saver when your trying to find a value which you're not sure of.

Re: Sib. 7.1.3: Guillotine Crop Marks above and below staves
Posted by Wim Hoogewerf - 27 Jul 09:31PM

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Preferences > Texture > Paper, graph?

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MacOS 10.9.5 Sibelius 8.4.1

Re: Sib. 7.1.3: Guillotine Crop Marks above and below staves
Posted by AndyZ - 28 Jul 08:32AM (edited 28 Jul 08:33AM)

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Dear Jim and Wim,

thank you both so much for thinking about my problem and providing such constructive replies.

I actually thought I replied yesterday but I must have failed to press "send". Apologies if this is a duplicate.

I think I will use all the ideas and take a "two belts and two pairs of braces" approach.

I've ordered a guillotine with "stops" on it and will use a symbol (designed in photoshop as a simple one pixel wide line) and turn on the graph paper to give me added comfort. I also found a very helpful button that switches on all the important dimensions on the page which I will use to double check the positioning of the symbols.

many thanks and if anyone else has this same odd query I would be delighted to advise on how it all went!

best wishes

Andy

PS I love your summary Jim

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Messages in this thread

Sib. 7.1.3: Guillotine Crop Marks above and bel... - AndyZ, 26 Jul 04:51PM

Re: Sib. 7.1.3: Guillotine Crop Marks above and... - Jim Druckenmiller, 26 Jul 10:59PM

Re: Sib. 7.1.3: Guillotine Crop Marks above and... - Wim Hoogewerf, 27 Jul 09:31PM

Re: Sib. 7.1.3: Guillotine Crop Marks above and... - AndyZ, 28 Jul 08:32AM