355: Alternative method of creating breath marks using a line rather than a symbol

Here is a tip for creating a breath mark as a line in Sibelius. Some advantages to this method over using a standard symbol are:

• You can drag the breath mark character contained in the line to exactly in the right place horizontally, and its positioning will flow with the bar width somewhat
• It works better with transposing parts than the symbol by itself.
• Just like using a symbol by itself, you can drag the mark to exact vertical and horizontal positioning, and you can also use default positioning to control the initial positioning of all breath markings.

To create this new line style:

• Choose House Style > Edit Lines
• Create a new Staff line based on one of the lines which normally appears over the staff (e.g. one of the horizontal dashed lines that does not have any playback effect) - select a suitable line and click New.
• Change the title of the line to Breath mark or something else similar
• Set the line Width to 0 (zero)
• With a solid line type selected, a thin gray line shows on screen but does not print. If you don't like seeing this gray line, you can set the line type to dashed and set a very small dash with a large space.
• Set both Start and Continuation to None (you may have to also delete any existing text from the Center text box)
• Set Cap to None for both Start and Finish
• Check the End Symbol box, and locate the breath mark symbol from the Symbol dialog.
• Click OK to confirm your changes.

You can now select your new line from the Create > Line dialog as normal.

This article contributed by Robert Puff.