Hi. In addition to composing, I use music edition software very much for music education. However, very often for music education, I need to have a lot of flexibility when engraving systems.
For example, in the image attached (on Finale), I changed the layout and placed the bars as I wanted on the page. I also resized the second system to make it bigger, and hided its bottom staff.
How can I achieve similar engraving flexibility using Dorico?
If you don’t have the answers for all the things I did in the example, but know something that can help, please let me know.
Currently, I am using Dorico 3 (and I am thinking of acquiring Dorico 4).
By the way, I know I can insert system break, lock system, and make into system in Dorico. However, this does not solve the issue.
For example, if I want one system with two bars and the other with 4, if I use system break, the bars will be stretched out until the end of the page, and that’s not what I want.
You might also like this festive video that shows examples of combining different frames (= “containers to show stuff”) to create various things:
(It shows an older version of the app so where you access things have changed a bit, but the core functionality is still the same.)
When bars stretch to the edge of the page, what they’re doing is stretching to fill the width of the music frame. If you make the music frame narrower, the music will likewise become narrower.
Another option is to put each exercise/example/separate “blob” of music into a separate flow. By default, Dorico doesn’t horizontally justify (spread out) the last system in a flow until it would fill more than half the width of the frame. When a flow is only one system long, this setting applies to its only system.
You can control which flow(s) appear in each frame using frame selectors. Another video that demonstrates this well is this one:
