Does Dorico have a Note Spacing function like Sibelius?

Does Dorico have a Note Spacing function like Sibelius?
THANKS~~

In a sense; it’s just running & updating continuously instead of having to be actively invoked.

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No. The main difference here is that in Sibelius you set a rule in one place (Note Spacing Rule) and then you separately have to tell Sibelius to apply it, whereas in Dorico you set it globally in Layout Options > Note Spacing or locally from Engrave > Note Spacing Change and it applies it automatically.

The second difference, which can be more irritating in that it’s less flexible, is that some of the relevant gaps, such as the gaps before and after barlines, are set in Engraving Options > Spacing Gaps, and these apply to the whole project - they can’t be adjusted for a specific layout or a specific section of music (without resorting to manually adjusting individual notes/barlines).

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Thank ~~ I will try

Whether it’s ** like ** Sibelius, I don’t know, but it does have excellent automatic Note Spacing, plus manual alterations and adjustments.

Are you trying to do a particular thing? It’s probably better to ask"how do I achieve this result", rather than ā€œwhat’s the equivalent function to something another app.ā€ Because Dorico very often works in a different way.

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I think this section should have better layoutšŸ˜‚
And how can I ensure I turned on the Automatic Note Spacing?
THANK a lotttttt~~~~~

It’s always on!

What’s the fullness percentage for that system? I suspect that it’s not a spacing problem (as such), but the staff size is too big. Or, you need to have fewer bars per line.

If your ensemble is only a few instruments, then you could remove the staff labels on every system. That would give you a tiny bit more space to work with.

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Hi @tonton5 , beside the suggestions above it is often better to post a cut-down version of the passage as Dorico file (just that system would be enough), to suggest the shortest way to obtain what you need.

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Thank you for your replies. I will continue to study hard.:saluting_face:

You also seem to have too many notes in the bass clef of the second displayed piano bar. Is this an XML import? I discovered this while duplicating your score fragment.

NO XML, all use dorico

I have used system break because there are sections without time signatures in the back section, which need to be on their own line, so I have tried my best to layout the previous parts hahahaha

As a Sibelius user, and similarly in learning Dorico, I can say that the various options in Sibelius for spacing notes is much more flexible, efficient and intuitive than in Dorico.
On this point, Dorico has more of a Ā« Finale-style Ā» interface and is less easy to handle.
We’re here to state things courteously, aren’t we (?), and not always try to place Dorico in first place for everything… We have to recognise its weaknesses, as well as your strengths. And I have a lot of faith in Dorico’s future, because it has a pretty good foundation. We shall see…

I’m not sure what Sibelius offers, but as a (former) Finale user, I respectfully disagree – I think that Dorico is miles better in this regard. For starters, Finale does not let you define different note spacing parameters in different parts (or different between score and part), let alone different parameters in different areas of the same part.

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When I speak Ā« Finale-Style Ā», I was thinking all dialog boxes en so on we encounter in Finale.

Please don’t be offended by this perhaps irrelevant comparison. I’m also aware that many former Finale users actually knew their software quite poorly ; as a result, some say that Finale can’t do this or that, or does badly, because they don’t handle it well. The same is true of Dorico, and we see it here on all the days, alas.

I did this all the time, different spacing in parts than score - I used JW Note Spacing, one of the few things about Finale I miss. That said, Dorico is out of the box much better than Finale when the rastrum is optimally sized; I spend less time tweaking and pretty much only in the score; Dorico is simply OMG awesome with part production.

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Right, but Finale didn’t natively support this – and the plugin had no way of indicating in the score/part that a different spacing was in effect for some or all of the measures, or even what spacing params had been applied to those measures.

Sorry, Aaron, but the Plug-in cited by Phase_Shift is provided and integrated in Finale, along many others…
These plug-in ARE part of Finale, for example, the TG-Tools Plug-in, integrated in Finale since many, many years !

It may be splitting hairs, but this isn’t entirely true. The JW plugins were written by Jari Williamsson and were available, for free, from his website; this one dates back 10 years or so. It wasn’t until v27.3 of Finale, released in 2022, that MakeMusic decided to license and include 8 of Jari’s plugins. I would not call these plugins ā€œnativeā€ to Finale, in the same way that user macros are not native to Dorico, and I would consider them ā€œprovidedā€ but not ā€œintegratedā€.

You also cite TGTools, but what MM licensed was just TGTools Lite – a few things from the incredible plugin package that Tobias Giesen sold on his website.

The third-party plugins were always both a strength and a weakness of Finale. They were made possible by the fact that MakeMusic provided a very detailed low-level API; they were made necessary by the fact that there was all kinds of very useful higher-level functionality (like note spacing regions) that MM never got around to coding themselves.

Personally, I would have found Finale unusable for serious work without a number of these plugins, some available for free and some not. MM eventually faced the fact that they were never going to make the time to add any of this functionality to the program, so they began licensing and including some of the most useful bits of plugins from Jari and a couple of other devs.

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For setting the rule in Sibelius, is it not exactly the same? A dialog box? The bit that doesn’t require a dialog is actually applying it, but that bit in Dorico’s automatic anyway.

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