I’m trying to create scale sheets for a school band program. As seen in the screenshots below, most of the scales are one-line long. Then the last scale is two lines.
I want to adjust the vertical spacing for the last two lines so they are closer together since they are part of the same scale. Is there a simple way to propagate this in the parts layouts?
I tried manually adjusting one of the parts and then propagating the formatting, but the system spacing didn’t propagate. Even a scripting/macro solution would be fine, but I could only achieve shrinking the spacing by a desired amount, not actually setting a uniform gap in each part.
I know I could just manually adjust each part, and honestly if this was a one-off project I would just do that, but this comes up fairly frequently in creating materials for students so any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Hi @e.drew, I would suggest using flows, for this, so that the single excercizes are nicely spaced out.
I first renamed your original Grade 7 flow as Grade 7 flow start (and Grade 8 flow as Grade 8 start). Then I choose Split Flow at the beginning of each exercise, using the jump bar (select the first item of exercise and press J, then write split flow: for subsequent splits, just press J+enter).
Dorico will then renumber the name/title of the flows maintaining the Grade x part of the name/title.
You need then just to delete the flow name and title of the flows/exercises that don’t need a title from Project Infos, and delete the start word from the remaining two flow names/titls (Grade 7 start and Grade 8 start).
Add-on: to make the gap between the exercises smaller, you can edit the Top margin of the flow heading (that are now partially empty because of the flows strategical renaming/retitling) -this, by the way, is one case where the fact that the upper staff of a music frame is not affected by such changes comes very handy- :
@Christian_R Thank you so much for this detailed and helpful solution!
Coming over from Finale, I am new to the whole idea of flows and I still don’t quite understand all of the advantages/challenges that come with using them. This seems like a great solution, so thank you so much for your insight and I will move forward as you suggested.
And yes: Flows are really powerful and elegant (together with the other many functionalities of Dorico).
By the way: if you want only a double barline between the exercises, you can set this per flow in Notation Options* (from menu Library). Select (in this case) all the flows, before you set and apply the changes:
*Notation Options are applied to specific Flows, that have to be selected in the right panel of the dialogue, first. Differently from the other Global Options like Layout Options or Engraving Options, that are applied to the (selected) Layouts.
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