Right on the heels of our recent notation engine improvements, here’s a nice new way of formatting text within your slices.

Previously, we only supported “text above” and “text below,” which look like this:

This type of text always gets its own dedicated margin — which, in practice, means it can be quite far from the notes it’s describing. It works well for high-level descriptions of music but not well for performance instructions and expressions such as accel.

Now, we support a second type of text — expression text — which is positioned much closer to the associated note.

You can place it either above or below notes, and it can be optionally italicized (a longtime convention for expression text).

To create this type of text, use the new “expression” buttons in our notation editor (documented here). We’ve also updated our MusicXML importer to use that style of text when appropriate.