Account for text in staves spacings

[ShacharHarshuv]

I’m writing this vocal chart for a musical, and the song has some parts of dialogue with underscore:

As you can see, it seems like by default Dorico does not accommodate for the text for the spacings of the staff (though it does accommodate for lyrics, of course)

I tried to manually change the staff spacing for this, but unfortunately it doesn’t automatically push the systems after it:

Pushing more systems is not helpful because you eventually run out of spage on the page:

How am I supposed to accommodate for this?

[DanielMuzMurray]

It looks like you have forced too many systems into the one frame - the red box at the bottom-left of your pages that are 100+% are telling me this. Or, Collision Avoidance is turned off (and Dorico is ignoring collisions).

Generally, there should be no need to make manual staff spacing adjustments for this type of thing.

Please upload your project and we can easily check.

[ShacharHarshuv]

layout issue.dorico (2.6 MB)

I don’t think I did anything special to make it happen. Not sure why my page is 101.6%.

The problem is with the Vocals Only layout.

[DanielMuzMurray]

I can see why it is confusing: there’s no type of collision changes, casting off isn’t being used and there are no manual frame/system breaks.

This could be the issue:

Overlapping systems with almost default layout settings

Unfortunately Dorico can’t always correctly predict whether a frame is going to become overfull, and once it has decided on the casting-off result, it can’t change its mind once it discovers that it was wrong. Dorico doesn’t know exactly how every item on every system will be positioned until the music is fully spaced, and of course the placement of some items, like beams etc., is dependent on the spacing itself, so there is a circularity to this process: it can’t figure out whether or not the m…

It’s probably something to do with the additional staff at the bottom of the page. All you really need to do is put a Frame Break at the end of the second last system and things should work out better for you.

[DanielMuzMurray]

Oddly enough, page one in your original screenshot shows the frame fullness at 101.6% and red (overfull). However, when I opened your file, it was green and 100%…

[ShacharHarshuv]

So there is a bug involving variable staff-per-system size? Here it’s a valid use case (solo song becomes a duet)

[DanielMuzMurray]

I wouldn’t necessarily call it a “bug”: behaviour that is unexpected or unexplainable etc.

The developers know about the issue and can explain why it happens. It’s just something that the program can’t do perfectly at this point.

However, I do know where you’re coming from.