Below two screenshots. The first one Violoncelli II refuses to condense till bar 39 on page/frame 2. As from bar 40 the VCII rests for 4 bars and condenses correctly.
and in the second I just deleted the C in the second voice in bar 5 and the two voices condense correctly on all pages.
I already spent a lot of time finding which note seems to cause the issue but how to solve it. The moment I put whatever note in the quarter rest in bar 5 the two voice are separated.
As always, a (cut-down) project file would be a lot easier to diagnose than a picture. But in any case you can almost always just put in a manual Condensing Change to force the staves to condense.
I was working on it. Not so easy with 9 flows (the full JW Children’s Suite from the first Harry Potter) and more than 50 instruments. So here is the reduced version till bar 39. I did some more tests and deleting the first C in bar 5 works but also the first C in bar 9 and in bar 11 but not the one in bar 15.
Family Portret.dorico (1.9 MB)
If you just input an empty condensing change (Reset) at bar 9, it solves the issue:
I think it’s condensing in two voices before 9 because of the lack of slurs in part 1.
This bit in Notation Options is the key, and especially the explanatory text. You have two pitch crossings in bars 13 and 14, while the limit to allow condensing is set to one. However — and I don’t pretend to understand why this is the case — when the phrases do not start at the same rhythmic position, pitch crossing is always allowed. Deleting any of those C’s creates this last condition, and so does breaking the phrase in bar 9, as @charles_piano showed.
If you set the pitch crossing limit higher or disable this restriction altogether, the condensing will work as expected.
Great findings. Many thanks both. Increasing to two pitch crossings does the job. I guess the condensing change starts the count anew and therefore also works.
The condensing change happens before both pitch crossings, so it does not ‘reset the counter’. What it does is break the phrase in the second divisi. Without it, the combined phrase for both parts extends from the start of bar 5 all the way to bar 35, being the only places that they have a rest at the same time. By breaking the phrase for divisi 2 at bar 9, divisi 1 is also ‘allowed’ to start a new phrase, but crucially two bars later, fulfilling the aforementioned condition and allowing unlimited pitch crossing in the rest of the (combined) phrase.
