Intro - I’m a Finale refuge, and I finally forced myself to do a short arrangement in Dorico now that the holiday crunch is done. I find most features to be equivalent or better …except note input, which I still find excruciating.
I did however, run into one problem that there HAS to be a better solution for. I need all staves to be evenly spaced, not scattered haphazardly based on note range, accents, expressions, rehearsal marks etc.
If things don’t fit, I am happy to adjust scaling or in some cases item formatting (e.g. rehearsal marks). …but after spending hours messing with all the layout options I could find, I still had to go through every part and manually set the spacing for every stave.
Disable collision avoidance for staves and systems (in the Minimum Gaps section). You might need to increase some of the Ideal Gaps to accommodate most of your extra notations.
I tried that, and it seemed to help a little, but didn’t solve the problem of being able to set a fixed height for all systems. (I am trying to fit 11 staves of 5-6 bars each per page to get it on one page. 10-12 staves per page is pretty common for this context.)
After re-setting the layout - which also wiped out my casting off, sadly. - and setting an ideal spacing of “6 spaces” for inter-system gap I would still get staff spacing from 4.5mm (WAY too tight) to 18mm.
Setting the spacing of every line to 14mm manually worked very well.
No, I don’t think that will be necessary. It’s just a short tpt/tbn duet, nothing unusual about it.
I was mostly wondering if there was an equivalent functionality to the Finale “Page Layout->Space Systems Evenly…” feature. I’ll just manually clean parts up for now.
Unlike Finale, Dorico is designed to justify the contents of the page, and avoid collisions between things. You can, as Derrek shows, set the thresholds so that Dorico won’t justify the contents. Dorico will then use the “Ideal Gaps” values, but will still adjust things to stop them crashing into each other.
You can also turn off collision avoidance between staves and systems:
