Previous Finale user here. One of the most useful features I used on Finale was actually a third-party plugin created by Jari Williamson called JW Fit Music. Most useful when formatting parts, this plugin allows you to select a certain number of bars and specify the number of systems you would like those bars to be spread out over, and it automatically fits those bars to the specified number of systems, to the best of its ability. So, you could select a page’s worth of music and tell the system to spread that music out to an additional 2 systems, or condense it into 1 fewer system, etc., and it would do it automatically without having to make a bunch of manual system breaks. It’s a massive time saver.
I haven’t found a similar feature in Dorico yet. I know the “Make into Frame” function is somewhat similar, but it’s clunky in comparison to JW Fit Music’s functionality. If there is not a comparable feature in Dorico, please consider this a feature request.
It works by letting you choose how close you want the notes to be - it’s my main tool for getting stuff onto a page without using system breaks. You can put as many note spacing changes in as you want.
There are a few page layout features in Dorico that are just a little clunkier or a bit more time intensive than Finale. Some features like JW Fit Music would be great, but there’s not really anything as simple as Finale’s native Ctrl+M Fit Music either. That was a really fast way to lock the spacing too. (Gif below for anyone that doesn’t know how Ctrl+M works.)
I second this request! I’m working on a practice project where I have 1 orphaned bar on a separate staff in pretty much all the parts. I know how to redistribute the bars on the page manually, but that means adjusting every system on the page. It would be a huge time saver to have a function like JW Fit Music. It’s not similar to the Casting Off option in Dorico (well you could use it like that if you wanted to) but it’s about achieving the best fit by distributing X number of bars over Y number of systems without having to force a fixed number of bars per system.
Probably easiest just to reduce the Note Spacing value of the whole Part in Layout Options, by a tiny bit. If you’ve got more than one Flow, use a Note Spacing Change.
P.S. When you make such a change, you can do it to all parts or any subset of them at once by selecting them on the right side of Layout Options first.
I second this feature request; it’s something I asked about last week.
Changing the note spacing is one way to accomplish this, but it has the side effect that if you decide to move measures around again later on, you have to also revert the spacing change you made.
Dorico already has “Make Into System” and “Make Into Frame”; what’s missing is something like “Make Into Systems”.
I would suggest that it might also help if Dorico could be a little smarter about measures between forced system or frame breaks. I think its current algorithm works kind of like a word processor: given the default measure spacing, put as many measures as you can in each system and then justify them. But an alternate method would be to distribute measures across systems so that the fill percentages are closer to being equal.
For example, let’s say I have 5 nicely spaced systems of music at the start of a frame. If I go to the last system and put a system break after the first measure, I now have 4 nicely spaced systems (fill of 85-95%), plus one system with one measure (fill of ~20%). It would be nice if Dorico could “reflow” those 5 systems to try to equalize the fill; this is more or less what “Fit Music” does in Finale, and it’s likely the desired layout.
Not sure I understand this. I find Note Spacing to be much more flexible to changes than forcing systems together and locking them.
I’m suggesting changing one value for the entire Layout; or adding a Change at the very beginning of the flow, so that all the systems use a tiny bit less space.
This way, I find that Dorico will change the casting off where it best fits across the whole layout, rather than just cramming an extra measure into the last system.
I’ll agree that Dorico’s spacing can need help in the final system or two – I suspect there’s a circular logic at play, where it can’t change the spacing it’s already done once it gets to the end and discovered that it’s short, without then having to re-do all the spacing again.
I’m not arguing against Fit Music as a feature – I’m saying that I don’t miss it, and if I lock down every system by my eye, that’s usually not as good as letting Dorico space it out as much as possible.
I also second this feature request - especially for setting up parts.
Publishers do not accept partial pages for parts… period. Way too much time is spent with trial and error adjustments to note spacing… hoping that the last system will land at the bottom of the last page of parts. Extremely inefficient!!
A feature that would “justify” the selected music into X number of pages (or frames) would solve this issue. Then Dorico automatically creates a multi-frame spacing change, justifies the music across the pages/frames and adds a signpost for it. As simple as that. No more trial and error with note spacing - again, hoping that the last system lands at the bottom of the last part page.
This also would keep the spacing consistent between pages/frames - another publisher requirement.
Ah, okay. Personally, that’s not an approach I would take myself; I don’t want to affect the entire document just to get a few systems to fit.
Note that unless you’re trying to cram measures into fewer systems, the “Fit Music” approach doesn’t actually change your note spacing – doesn’t change the default space for quarter note or the spacing ratio. All it does is justify the systems a little more generously.
Yeah I’ve been toying around with that, but that applies to the whole flow and not just the page I’m trying to redistribute. I agree with @asherber on that, I don’t want to change parts of the document that don’t need to be changed in other to respace one page. Also, tweaking the note spacings gave me some wonky results at first, with some systems packed to the brim with bars that were full of 16th notes while other systems had only 3 or 4 bars with half and whole notes (I made sure to unlock my entire layout first). So I actually had to change a bunch of values to get the page and systems to look more or less evenly filled and after that I still had to move around some measures manually. The beauty of Fit Music is that it takes 98% of stuff like this out of your hands which I think makes it one of the most Dorico-esque plugins in the Finale universe.
JW Fit Music is certainly a quick way in Finale to fill out the page(s), but because it arrives at its results through justification, often it results in some weirdly spaced systems, and inconsistent spacing from system to system. The advantage of using note spacing changes to fill out the pages is that the decisions can be based on the content of the music, the meter changes like @benwiggy says, the level of rhythmic density, etc. While this might take marginally more time than selecting all and using JW Fit Music, the results are better, imho.
I cannot see what is happening in the dialog but it seems to be a good function. It reminds me of the similar function in Amadeus;
34a10 = 34 bars on 10 systems
or
34a = “do what you [the program] feel it best”
and numerous other similar codes that made it easy to distribute bars efficiently. I explained the “Amadeus way” for DS some time ago and I think he noted it so perhaps we will find a similar function in a future Dorico version.
Here’s a better image of the dialog for the standard Fit Music:
It was great because you could select a region and then with one click set the bars per system for the layout. JW Fit Music was a similar thing but coming from the opposite direction. Instead of setting bars per system, you set how many systems you wanted the given selection to fit into. I’d love to see similar functions make their way into Dorico.
Both Fit Music and JW Fit Music would only be applied to whatever bars were selected so weren’t as heavy handed as Dorico’s LO / Staves and Systems / Casting Off settings, and were definitely faster than going through the project using , and . or experimenting with different Note Spacing Changes.
