Gah. So I’m hitting a problem that occurs in Sibelius that I thought (I am still hoping!) Dorico had nailed:
In setup / layout options I have selected “automatically avoid collisions between adjacent staves and systems”.
I want to use Rastal Size 5 (6mm) in my score, but whenever I select it i get collisions like this:
So I try inserting a system break, but now I get the same issue somewhere else:
If I use Rastal Size 4 (6.5mm) everything looks great. But I don’t want to use Size 4.
p.s. I know there are work-arounds with system and frame breaks, I’m only curious as to why Dorico doesn’t spot that objects are overlapping onto adjacent systems.
p.p.s. now I’m working with frame and system breaks and the problem is compounding further into the flow:
I would need to see a bit more of your music to be able to say for sure what might be happening, but I expect the issue is that you have a high density of items above and below the staff, such as ornaments, dynamics, pedal lines, etc., and if so, you should probably increase the various default values for the ideal staff gaps on the Vertical Spacing page of Layout Options.
During the layout process, Dorico has to make an estimate early on about how much music it might be able to fit into the frame. It uses the number of staves in the system, their ideal gaps as defined in Layout Options, plus some heuristics about the items positioned above or below the staff to make a guess as to the likely height of each system. At this stage, it doesn’t know exactly how the music will be cast off, so it can’t be precise. It is also aggressive, i.e. it doesn’t allocate much extra space for things like dynamics, etc., because we don’t want Dorico to space the music out unduly wide.
If your music typically has a lot of extra stuff protruding above and below the staff, then the best approach is to increase the relevant staff-staff gaps in Layout Options, which gives Dorico a hint that it should expect each system to be a little taller.
It’s probably not the case that, unless your music is very uniform in the density of its additional notations etc., you can come up with a single value that will work for every single page unless you choose something pretty loose, but you should still be able to get good results on the vast majority of systems with a bit of tweaking to Layout Options.
I too run into regular collision/overlap of staves, or overlapping staves (with no manual adjustments in engraving mode being made). What is curious is that some pages which have exactly the same number of visible staves are rendered correctly, and other pages with identical staves (especially near the end) overlap each other. I know that I can manually override those “automatic” system/frame breaks, but it would seem that Dorico should see the collisions happening. I’ll post an example (or email it to Daniel) if it’s helpful. But it is frustrating, as this seems to happen regularly/randomly.
dwlarson, please read my reply above, which explains why this is happening and provides some suggested remedy. If you find that the suggested remedy doesn’t help, I’d be happy to take a look at your project.
I’ve run into this problem more times than I would like… this last example is not enormous but the like happens again and again
…and I don’t think it is cramped…
Daniel, I tried to change the vertical spacing in Dorico 4 to avoid the staves collision with dynamics. However, as you can see in the image, the “Minimum inter-staff gap with content” is already showing enough space between the dynamic of a staff and the note of the staff below, although that’s not what is happening in the score. So, where else can I change it in a way it becomes automatic for the whole score?
PS: I tried putting this “Minimum inter-staff gap with content” in “3”. It was basically the minimum necessary for these 2 staves (Thundersheet and Suspended Cymbal) not to collide. However, the space between Tuba and Timpani became too large.
@DanielMuzMurray Staff group to staff group is 8 spaces (the default), and in this case I don’t think it would change it because the collision is within staves of the same group (well, I plan to divided them into 2 groups, but as for now they are part of the same bracket).
@MarcLarcher I am not sure if what you mean is this:
Switch to Engrave mode.
Click the staff spacing icon on the left edge of the window.
At the bottom of each page you should see a fullness indicator. If it’s over 100% then Dorico is having to compromise in order to squeeze everything onto the page.
I see, it was indeed worth I try. I augmented the “Minimum inter-staff gap with content” (so avoid the collision) and reduced the Staff group to staff group from 8 to 1, but the gap between the Tuba and the Timpani did not reduce.
It’s already an A3 page size.
The condensing should be done only after the piece is fully written, right? If that’s the case, I suppose I should wait until the end and, if the issue is not solved when condensing, I should try to reduce the staff size as you suggested.
