I’d love to see an additional option to Make into system, in which you can select a section of music and specify a fixed number of bars to make into each system.
In big band/jazz charts it’s not always necessary to keep e.g. 4 bars per system in the orchestral parts, but when it comes to improvised sections that is more important. (4 bars or whatever the harmonic period is)
IIRC from my time using Sibelius many, many years ago, I seem to recall that feature being there.
Cheers 
Meanwhile, in case it helps, a quick method could be to create two system breaks spaced four bars apart (for example), select both of them in Write mode, and press R to copy‑paste the section right after, as many times as you need:
That’s a pretty handy way @charles_piano . The problem, though, is that you need to jump between Write/Engrave when working with the parts layouts, which isn’t ideal.
There are a number of reasons we’re forced to flip between the two when writing (or engraving) the music, but I don’t understand why in this case. Can’t you just do this when you’re finished with everything else as a final formatting before printing?
This suggestion resembles quite a lot the bar distribution function in Amadeus, where you would say “a” = n bars on m systems, or, if you want to let the software decide what the best is, “a”, or the more explicit “4,3,6,4,…” if you want to set the number of bars exactly. Naturally, any combination would work too, e.g. “12a3,4,5,14a,4,30a7,…” It would be nice to have a similar Sign Post in Dorico, but that may be impossible because of the Write/Engrave separation design (which I like in many respects).
I’m pretty confindent in various work arounds and that wasn’t my question. My goal is to streamline my workflow, and this is probably the only thing I really miss from Sibelius.
Hmm, I’m not familiar with Amadeus and I’m not sure I understand what you are explaing.
What I’m looking for is either a type of system break that allows me to specify a fixed number of bars per system from that point onwards, or the ability to select a section of bars and lock that specific section to a certain number of bars per system.
I see that my < and > was lost so the code makes no sense at all.
Imagine in pop-over (like time signature/meter) where you would write
12a3,3,4,30a,4
which would mean
etc. This is what I think you were requesting.
It’s almost like the “grouping” in time signatures.
Ah, that sounds interesting.
Anyway, I just wanted to point out something here that I’ve felt was missing. Hopefully, the development team will take a closer look at it sometime in the future and come up with a brilliant solution, as always.
