Finale Forum

A tie can be broken because of time signature or barline. In my case, I wanted to break it because of time signature, but as time signature is "originally" positioned down in the staff level, and as I have displaced mine above the staff using Document Options, the tie cannot be broken now. I used Special Tools to try to edit the tie bow, setting the break by default, on, or off, but nothing seems to work. Are there any tips & tricks how to force-break the tie so that there is no collision with the time signature on top?

I enclose the screen shot; the problematic tie is the highest one that is going over 8/4 time signature.
Thank you in advance.

You can do it with a workaround:

Use a separate staff for the time signatures.
This “time signature staff” is positioned 24pt above the Grand Staff, and it displays only time signatures (= de-select the display of Clefs, Key Signatures, Repeat Bars &c., but keep the display of Stems).

In the “time signature staff”, move the barlines vertically down into the Grand Staff.
In that way you will get rid of all barlines in the “time signature staff”.

Do not enter the “broken” tie in the Grand Staff.
Instead, enter two notes in the “time signature staff”, and tie them together.

The tie will be broken because it crosses a time signature “positioned down in the staff level” (your own words).

The attached example was done in Finale.

Another workaround: use a tuplet definition.

You would set up a tuplet in the first bar (e.g. a 3:2 quarter tuplet) with a slur instead of a bracket and the whole "3:2" proportion shown. It must be above the staff and be horizontally dragabble.

The tuplet's slur will get broken by the width of the proportion, and that's the thing to exploit. You would have to move the proportion off page to have it not printed.

Peter and Harald - thank you both for the workaround suggestions, I tried them out and it seems fine in the end. Another workaround came to my mind, too; to hide the time signature and instead to create one in Expression Tool. That won't break the slur, but at least one can move it elsewhere to avoid it (which wouldn't be possible in Document Options, as the time signature placement there applies to all the signatures in the score).

Cheers

Slavicek,

You say an expression won't break the slur (I think you meant tie) but if you put an opaque enclosure around the expression it will cover a tie, though not a slur.

Bill Stevens

Bill, yes, I meant tie. And you're right, the enclosure works, too.

Thank you all for help