Cleaning up a messy score layout

Dorico
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I have been importing MIDI tracks into Dorico for a large project. They get imported one-by-one and while I’m working in Galley View it’s fine… but the full score layout in Page View winds up looking something like this mess:

Screen Shot 2023-07-11 at 5.37.38 PM
Screen Shot 2023-07-11 at 5.37.38 PM1920×1570 256 KB

I’m clearly not using the proper workflow here and that’s why I’m in this terrible spot.
Is there a simple way to clean up this layout, short of tweaking each staff in Engrave mode?
And what am I missing in my workflow? Do I need to start with a custom template and import into that?

Btw the size of the ensemble, if that makes a difference, is 13 instruments (fl, cl, bsn, hrn, trb, vln 1 & 2, vla, vc, cb, 2x percussion, elec. percussion), 3 voices + occasionally some Actor voices, plus rehearsal piano part. Possibly around 20 staves in a given scene.)

Any insights or tips appreciated.

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It’s hard to say without seeing the file itself, but it looks as though your page layout settings (Library>Layout Options>Page Setup…) need adjusting. Try reducing the space size for starters.

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Dorico won’t automatically change page size, staff size, vertical spacing settings etc for you: you need to choose the page and staff size most appropriate for the layout.

Here’s a useful video on this topic:

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Thank you both. This is great. By going into Layout Options and changing both paper size and Rastral Size (under Space Size) it all works nicely.
@Lillie_Harris The video was helpful. I see now that Dorico won’t set those things up for me, but I was pleasantly surprised that as long as I put in workable values for paper size and rastral size, it fixed all the formatting and made it look very good! I was afraid that I was going to be stuck with that mess unless I fixed staves by hand or started with the perfect template already set up.

Btw, as a UX note - I had seen the “rastral size” option but was afraid to change it, because I did not expect something with such an obscure name to actually control the size of EVERYTHING musical. I barely know what rastral means (and I’m sure I’m not alone!) and figured that if I changed it I might mess up the proportions and wind up with tiny staves but normal-sized notes, markings, et cetera.

Thanks!

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Music engraving has its own vocabulary, rules, and conventions, which are separate from that of notation.

There are books on the subject; but you’d also find the term used in context in the Dorico videos about Layout Options and creating a new project from the Hub.

(Rastral comes from the Latin for ‘rake’. The tool used to cut staff lines into a metal plate was a sort of rake-shaped 5-pronged tool.)

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Glad that was helpful and you’ve now got your score sorted!

There’s an explanation of rastral vs space size on this page, which should be the first result when searching the manual for “rastral size”:

It’s also listed in our glossary: rastral size

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@Lillie_Harris Thanks. Of course, now that I’ve learned the way this works in Dorico I’ll remember it, so no big deal, I’m sorted. But without this forum post I think it might not have been totally clear to me, even if I found the entry in the manual.

I could possibly read it and think “this isn’t what I’m looking for. I don’t want to change the distance between lines, I’m looking for how to change the size of everything all together, so it stays in proportion!” (I’ve used “endlessly customizable” software where you can screw the proportions of everything up by changing little parameters so I may have PTSD.)

Right now, the terms ‘staff size’, ‘rastral size’, and ‘space size’ are being used. Of the three, ‘staff size’, which is used in the manual, sounds most likely to change everything together, but ‘rastral size’ and ‘space size’, which are used in the Layout Options box, both sound like micro-parameters to me.

But actually they are all really referring to the same thing, in the end (meaning that there’s just one thing that all of those refer to, they don’t change independently), and it isn’t spelled out anywhere that this magic number is what the size of everything else - notes, text, etc - is adjusted to fit.

(Somehow, in my mind, finding something that used a percentage, instead of a measurement in mm/in, might imply that it changed everything together, fwiw.)

Ok, just my feedback in case it’s helpful in future iterations. Thanks for the help, everyone!