Circle TAB Half and Whole Notes

Version 01.34.00
Added 17 Sep 2009 (last updated 06 Sep 2020)

For use with Sibelius 6, Sibelius 7.1, Sibelius 7.5, Sibelius 8.x, Sibelius 18.x, Sibelius 19.x, Sibelius 20.x, Sibelius 21.x, Sibelius 22.x, Sibelius 23.x, Sibelius 24.x and Sibelius 25.x

Circle TAB for Half & Whole Notes will find half and whole notes in a guitar (guitar only) TAB staff, and add circle or ellipse symbols to cover these notes or chords, so as to indicate their duration. This is not as good as having Sibelius support this as a feature, but it really beats doing the same thing by hand.

The symbols will be in a drawing layer on top of the notes, so to access the notes you will have to pull the symbols out of the way. However, the plugin has an option to delete all the added symbols, and another to delete existing symbols and add new ones, which works well if you are still editing the score.

The zip file includes a House Style library that must be installed in the user House Style folder. The plugin will load symbols from this House Style.

The symbols and their placement are customizable, (if tediously) using the Options� button. You can choose different symbols and specify their X and Y offsets in the dialog, and these values are preserved over Sibelius sessions. The plugin author can provide more details if you actually want to try this.

Updated 22March2015 to make it work with 5 line and 4 line TAB staves as well as 6 line guitar tab.It will not work with TAB staves greater than 6 lines, and probably never will.

Updated 22April2017 Added new set of SVG graphics symbols for Sib 7+. Also added ability to set draw order in front of or behind TAB numbers.

Updated 22April2017. Modified the graphics to be big enough to avoid the whited out blocks so the symbols can be drawn behind the numbers. You will need the updated plugin and updated house style TabHalfWholeSib7Plus.lib, which the installer should provide.

Updated 25 April 2017. Made the symbols opaque and forces them always to be behind the TAB numbers but in front of the staff lines and note stems. There are now 3 House styles that are installed (for Sib 7+, the opaque one is actually used. Fixed problems with Sib 7.1.3 being unable to read the house styles, and rearranged the dialog a bit.

Updated 9 August 2018. Version 01.33.00. Removed unwanted trace and fixed draw order in Sib 6.

Updated 4 August 2020. Version 01.33.01. Rebuilt the graphics files used to make the house style TabHalfWholeSib7PlusOpaque.lib so they would display correctly in Sib Ultimate. Thanks to Robin Walker. Users should reinstall. If you had run the plugin before and gotten bad symbols, you will need to go into Notations Edit Symbols and delete all the user defined symbols from 1Line1Digit through 6Lines2Digits and then rerun the plugin.

Updated 4 August 2020. Version 01.33.02. Recreated TabHalfWholeSib7PlusOpaque.lib from a Sibelius 7 format file so it cam be imported into scores from Sib 7.1.3 or later.

Updated 5 September 2020. Version 01.34.00. In Sib 7.5 or later, the plugin can now recognize if the main fonts in your score differ from those in the House Style that is imported to get symbols, and warns you how to deal with that. There is now a Help button that describes what you can do.

Plug-in written by Bob Zawalich.

Categories