Avoiding cluttered look with beamed notes

Hello. I am working on a score that involves a long series of quintuplets, sometimes in two part harmony. I feel It would be most desirable to have four bars per system, but when I set it as such the notes appear jumbled and hard to read because of inconsistent spaces between each individual note. I have tried messing around with rastral and space size in layout options, but neither seems to solve the issue. Would love any advice that is there, thanks much!

Welcome to the forum, @ivan.salaam.

You’ll find that the spacing is actually consistent, but just not ideal: notes with accidentals all have the same gap from the previous note; notes without accidentals are likewise all the same distance from their previous note.

You might find some difference by changing the default note spacing ratio via Layout Options but, with so many notes in the one system, I think a smaller rastral size is your only real option. You could change the default gap between accidentals and the previous note but this would obviously affect the whole project.

In what way does changing the rastral size not help things?

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Hi @ivan.salaam, as @DanielMuzMurray mentioned, the Space size is a good way to make possible a system fullness <100%. Only if the system fullness is =or <
100% Dorico can use the spacing satisfactorily.
For so many notes you need a quite small space size, though.

Her an example with A4 page size, and default page margins, and no indent . Note spacing for quarter notes set to 2.
You need a space size of 0.95mm (3.8mm staff)

Other strategies involve lowering of the page margins, using a larger paper size, select the notes and make them cue sized in the properties panel, adjusting the mentioned engraving options for gaps (notes and accidentals)…or distribute the notes on more than one staff :wink:

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That is probably not a good starting point from which to think about good layouts.

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You are not going to get a “non-cluttered” look with 4 bars per system in the example you provided.

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word, unfortunately you’re probably right.