Hi Lillie,
opening this older thread as the page-tied vertical spacing issue keeps returning. I keep coming to cases, in which the spacing doesn’t fall into the general categories the per-layout vertical spacing options looks for. A typical one would be with larger text blocks:
When on top of the page, the avoid collisions toggle doesn’t yield intended results – namely that the system labeled C would be positioned below the text block. If these text blocks are of varying size, altering page margins as I read elsewhere on this forum, doesn’t quite solve the issue. Then if music or spacing is changed, with a larger score all the vertical adjustments are lost. I much appreciate Dorico’s flexibility in terms of adjusting the score for example in situations when new instruments are added or taken so this is a bit confusing.
With my current experience, some kind of a vertical spacing lock would be much welcome since a lot of things do evolve during the process as was mentioned by @klafkid earlier in this thread. Please let me know if I am missing something.
When you’re doing this kind of manual tweaking… manual tweaking is required. Once you’re in the realm of page overrides like this, you need to override the default music frame too.
Text frames are floating and can be placed anywhere; the music doesn’t avoid them because there are plenty of times when you might want to place text on a dense page between staves and not have the music move, but rather add to to what’s already there.
In this case you need to select the top middle handle of the music frame and move it down below your giant text blob.
In a situation like this, with such a large text block, I am a great proponent of using Custom Page Templates so that, if something forces the music to another page, one can simply reassign the custom page rather than having to recreate it from scratch.
(I am also puzzled why two rehearsal letters in the illustration seem to apply to the same measure.)
@Romanos and @Derrek thanks for your tips! I will try these strategies. I understand these situations may have to be dealt with on a one by one basis, yet I would love to see a way for the manual tweaking to be pertained once it is done. I suppose now there is no way to do that?
Locking manual changes made on a per flow basis would be great imho. I have created a book of a variety of ear training exercises coupled with songs and chorals. That requires a few different formatting needs and a large number of flows have made that possible. There are some manual changes that have been required to the vertical spacing because I simply can’t find a justification % to accommodate every situation. The problem is if I ever want to add to the book with a new song or choral that messes up the vertical spacing. I wish there were some way to lock the manual changes to each flow so that even if they were moved around or if new ones were added they would retain their look.
I completely agree with this request. I think ideally one could lock each flow’s formatting so that if you extend a flow before it, it doesn’t have the knock on effect of messing up all your formatting in all of the rest of the flows. I’ve spent the last two years working on a chamber oratorio with 32 songs. I’ve ended up splitting the piece into multiple files for this very reason. I’ve tried combining a scene of say six flows into a single file, and I love having everything like this except when something changes and I’ve already started to fine tune the layouts for whatever reason - maybe I want to present a particular version to the team, so I start to make it look nice. If we then decide to add a few bars, or I cut a section, or I change the manual staff visibility in the parts because I’m experimenting with different layouts, it messes the whole thing up. I am using custom page templates, but invariably you end up with some overrides…You simply can’t create a custom page template for every little subtle edit you make on a page. Somehow the amazing flexibility of the present system has severe limitations once you’ve started customizing your layouts and then need to change something. I think being able to lock individual flow layouts would go a long way to fixing this. I hope the team can come up with a great solution!
