Hello. I’m making a repeat attempt to migrate from Musescore to Dorico, this time with a trial of the pro version, which has engraving mode. I’m more motivated this time around because everyone is moving to Dorico after the demise of Finale.
But Dorico is making choices WRT note and system spacing that make no sense to me. I could override this manually, but part of the value proposition of Dorico is that it will just “do the right thing”. I’ve managed to get Musescore to behave reasonably well, but maybe due to my newbie status, I’m completely failing with Dorico.
Referring to the attached document, I don’t understand why Section A has made different horizontal spacing choices than Section B, when the content is identical. Also, the vertical spacing choices between systems don’t seem to make sense, there seems plenty of room to move the systems with the large spacing closer together.
In Musescore, there is a command to squeeze or stretch the horizontal spacing of a selected range of measures, is there such a thing in Dorico?
Also in Musescore, you can select minimum and maximum system spacing, but I don’t see that in Dorico, just “ideal spacing”. If I could set maximum system spacing, I could force Dorico to behave.
Finally, why are the measurements for vertical spacing in mm when manually adjusting, but in the layout options they are expressed in “spaces” (whatever that means)?
Well, there are a bunch of manual system breaks in there right now, but if I delete them all, Dorico still puts the section at letter B on two lines. The reason is that that section ends with a double barline, where the section at letter A ends with a single barline – and that double barline is just wide enough to cause problems. If you go to Engrave mode and look at the fullness indicator (green box) for the system at A, you’ll see that it’s 99.8% full; if I force the material at B onto one line, Dorico says it’s 100.5% full. If I change the double barline to a single, Dorico pops the section at letter B onto a single line automatically.
The equivalent thing in Dorico is probably inserting a manual note spacing change.
A space is the distance between two staff lines – 1/4 of the height of a normal 5-line staff. You’ll find that many settings in Dorico are expressed in spaces so that they are proportional to the size of the staff that you choose in Layout Options. The distance between systems, for example, should be bigger when your staves are bigger and smaller when they are smaller. Setting the distance in spaces accomplishes that.
OK, but that doesn’t solve the problem, since Dorico seems to be inserting “too much” vertical spacing based on what I see, rather than too little. So there is no way to get Dorico not to do that other than resort to manually moving the systems around? And can you explain why Dorico is inserting so much vertical space and seemingly inconsistently?
So when you say “force the material”, you do that manually moving notes? Or maybe you could also do this by adjusting the (minimum) note spacing somewhere in the layout options? Thanks for pointing out what those percentages mean, I was wondering about that.
You can manually move measures using the ,and . keys. You can also add a system break at letter B and another at letter C, and then in the Properties panel set the one at B to “Wait until next system break”, which tells Dorico to keep all the measures between the breaks on one system.
Yes, you could also change the default note spacing in Layout Options, or you could insert a manual note spacing change at B to make the spacing a little tighter, and then another change at C to reset it.
First: your page is overfull (110%). Move the final system of page 1 to the next frame and you will notice a difference.
Second: Dorico calculates vertical spacing based on objects at the same rhythmic positions. Even if you move dynamics, chords, rehearsal marks manually (as you have), Dorico still allows enough room as though they were at their default positions. Select all and Reset Position and you’ll notice that no staves move.
I agree, as I predict you will, that this is not optimal.
You predict well. I would use stronger language, this seems like a major design oversight. It could be a deal breaker for me, especially considering that Dorico is not cheap. In Musescore if you move stuff around to make room, the systems will move closer together. I will play with moving systems vertically manually, maybe that is rich enough feature set and can be done quickly enough to not bog me down. But geez. It strikes me that this approach will not “scale well” (no pun intended).
For text objects (and maybe a few other things), you can also deactivate a Property called Avoid Collisions. This will do the same thing but just for that object.
Dorico does the same thing, but you have to move things out of the way in write mode.
This tripped me up in the beginning, and for playback related items this is not ideal obviously, but I made my peace with it.
Then again, Daniel’s tip above about disabling collision avoidance is critically important!
It would be helpful if we could somehow set the trigger zone or margin for collision avoidance in order to allow for tighter spacing…
@Andrew_Voelkel I think this has to do with the fact that there are so many different styles of music to work with, and that some kind of defaults had to be chosen. What I describe below is something I never felt the need for in the music I work with but perhaps one day!
Maybe what you would like is a fixed distance between all systems?
Here is your file with Collision avoidance in Minimum gaps unchecked, and the Inter-system gap is set to 12:
The distance between systems is bigger though , because of vertical justification settings. If you do not want that to happen, this is the same file with –
The difference is the double bar at the end of B, which is just enough to tip that system over 100%. You could reduce the Note Spacing to a smaller value, like 3.75.
You’ve manually set all the dynamics to Below the staff – which is their default position anyway. That Might be an XML import thing.
Here’s my take on it. Reset as many manual changes to default; change system gap to 12 spaces; add a couple of Breaks. Change Note Spacing to 3 7/8.
I would like to thank everyone for all their help. I’m much closer to where I want to be - I think my issues are solvable with Dorico at this point.
I found the feature for changing note spacing “midstream” to be really great, it’s better than the Musescore way of doing it because it puts a visible “event” in the score so you can see what’s up. I only wish that you could use this feature interactively without closing the dialog box to see the effect. But it works.
One unsolved problem is manually moving a bunch of staves vertically together after getting the vertical spacing of a flow close. It doesn’t seem to work the way I saw on a (admittedly very old) YouTube video. Playing around, I thought I was getting it to work, but when I dragged a few systems, they all moved except the very top system I selected. Is there a more up to date video on this? I didn’t even try the “concertina” version because I couldn’t get the basic stuff to work right.
I had to tell Dorico to ignore collisions for vertical spacing. This is unfortunate but if I solve the problem in the above paragraph it will be workable.
I haven’t figured out yet how to delete the flow header. I still need to learn the whole Master Page system, which strikes me as powerful. I do wish there was a way to tell Dorico to forget about the whole idea of left and right pages. Everyone I work with uses Forscore on an iPad (as do I), so the whole notion of left and right pages is useless.
One problem I’m running into in general is that information sources on the web about Dorico often seem out of sync with the current version of Dorico. In a sense that’s good because it means Dorico is evolving quickly, but it can be frustrating as well
but perhaps one day!
