I’ve finished entering my choral score in Write mode, and am now switching to Engrave mode to get it laid out well. Usually Dorico does a superb job at it. Well, most of this choral score lays out fine, and then weirdly there’s a page in the middle that does not. See screenshot (with the actual music blurred out – but look at the vertical staff positions).
How can I fix/improve this? I twiddled with all the settings in Layout Options > Vertical Spacing. Most notably, I set Inter-System Gap to 13 spaces, which works on most other pages. But this page doesn’t respect that and I can’t figure out why.
Any suggestions? Normally Dorico is excellent in Engrave mode, but there must be some setting somewhere that’s making this not work.
As you can see at the bottom left, the page frame is over-full (115%). It’s difficult to tell because it’s blurred out, but it looks like there are several stacked dynamics that are forcing the staves further apart from one another. Manual adjustment is probably the only way. Can’t really give more specifics without seeing the project.
As said, just add a Frame Break on the first bar of the last system (bar 82?).
While you’re at it: you’ll save some horizontal space by not using full names on every staff. Singers are creatures of habit, and will sing the same line until directed otherwise.!
Use Abbreviated staff labels if there are changes in the piece. If not, don’t use labels at all after the first system.
Layout > Page Setup: reducing rastral size will compact each system
Layout > Vertical Justification: change the percentages
Layout > Staves and Systems: casting off (fixed number of systems per page)
