A request to add to the casting off options a maximum amount of measures on a system, but not a fixed amount for every system.
I’m finding in piano music I’m engraving there are times when one can only get 2 or 3 measures on a line (for example, lots of 16th notes). Other times Dorico puts as many as six measures per line. It doesn’t look good to my eye to have one line with 6 measures and the ones above and below with only 2 measures. I like the note spacing settings I have and the way Dorico spaces things out. I’d like Dorico to do its magic with spacing, but never have more than xx measures per system. Hopefully I’m making sense and not repeating a previous request.
Don’t forget you can apply system breaks, and with the relevant option enabled you can break mid bar, and recall that this is often done with very long bars in classical copper engraving too.
I can’t help thinking that if you have a system in which Dorico wants to put 6 bars, according to your spacing settings, and you constrain it to 2 or 3, the spacing in the bars will look unnaturally wide.
I wouldn’t constrain a line to 2 or 3 measures if there are only half or even quarter notes. However, sometimes Dorico’s automatic spacing algorithm puts only 2 or 3 due to the number of smaller notes (16th, 32nd, etc) in a measure. That looks fine to me.
I am aware of and use system breaks and even note spacing changes but being able to automatically limit the number of measures to a maximum amount per system would be nice in quite a bit of piano music I engrave.