I’m having an issue with formatting here, and couldn’t find any info relating to it online or on this forum, though I’m sure someone must have run into it before.
I made a system break after the word “own” (2nd system) so that the next phase would start on the next line. Now, I’m trying to line up the last notes in each system to make it look better. I did the bottom staff easily with the horizontal spacing tool in Engrave mode (was that the best way?). However, when I try to adjust the last (partial) measure in the second system the same way, it just pushes around the notes in the last full measure. I’m sure it’s simple, but I haven’t found it… how do I push the measure bar between “His” and “own” closer to the end of the system?
Unfortunately I think Dorico has no provision for this. I found one workaround:
Add a tick barline at the system break (and an explicit regular barline at the next full bar to reestablish the meter). In engrave mode, select the tick barline and set its Tick adj. properties both to –½ (or whatever makes it disappear). This provides the note spacing handle you need.
Once the tick is hidden in this way, of course you can no longer select it by clicking. If you need to change or delete it, you can use the system track to select everything in both half-bars on either side of it, and filter for time signatures to get just the invisible tick barline.
Ok, thanks for that. In this case, I think I’d sooner just have it be misaligned slightly rather than do all that extra stuff for so small an effect. I appreciate the effort, though, in providing a workaround. I’ll definitely keep it in mind should the time come when I’m really needing something of this sort aligned.
It would be nice to see an easy way to do this adjustment in a future release.
@Mark_Johnson Thank you! That worked perfectly.
I guess the easiest fix would be if Dorico offered an invisible barline as a choice.
There is a reason not to do that - and why the notated music is laid out this way: when the barlines don’t align, it helps the brain-eye coordination to read and understand the music and not to jump lines by accident. Personally I would not make the edit at all for this reason.
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There could be some truth to that, but for me, an inch of wasted real estate is usually more of an issue than losing my place in the song. In the stuff I do, there’s typically enough variation with other things (lyrics and notes) that having bar lines aligned wouldn’t affect much. If a singer loses his place because the bar lines were aligned, he wasn’t paying attention, at least in my field of work.