Hello,
in my opinion, I have searched the forum and not found exactly, what I meant…
It would be great to be able to do the above mentioned thing, e. g. have all staves spread with the distance of exactly “n” mm from each other regardless of the collisions between objects or so (of course this would mean to override this great feature). Quite often it seems to happen that I would rather move a single object above or below a staff a bit than to have the staves - sometimes - very unevenly spread over the page.
And it would be great in parts to have the first staff of a following page jump automatically in the free space on the bottom of the page before without having to fiddling with other options when moving the staves on the page before closer together manually. I know about the settings in the different option panes, yet this sometimes would be more easy and faster…
Thank you so much for your fantastic work, Daniel and the team!
Have you explored “Vertical justification”? If you set your inter-system gap and “gap with content” to 0 (or at least very low), and set your fill-frame justification to a low percentage, you can manually add frame breaks to choose how many systems you want in a frame, and those systems should justify equally.
Setting the inter-system gaps to a low value will prevent collision avoidance from affecting the vertically-justified (hence, equidistant) systems.
For your second request: I read it twice to make sure I didn’t misunderstand. Isn’t this just a matter of making it into a frame?
Dorico isn’t being coy; it’s spacing the staves based on the values you have set, both for gaps and for frame size/margins.
You can click the start and endpoints and “make into frame.” Or set a frame break at the start of each desired frame location, then toggle on “wait until next frame break” on the first one.
I do admit I don’t always understand why Dorico doesn’t add that last system to the bottom of the first page. Sometimes I feel sure there’s enough room… but as I said, I suppose it’s a matter of working with the actual spacing values we’ve entered.
Changing the distances between staves and systems in Engrave mode doesn’t cast the music off again. This is important in order to retain the predictability and stability of making edits in Engrave mode. Think about it: if you managed to narrow the gap between existing systems to the point that another system can fit onto the page, and Dorico casts the music off again to allow that system to fit, then all of the previous edits you’ve just made will potentially be invalid because now the frame is considerably more full, and justification will give a completely different result.
If you want to bring more music onto the page, use the Make Into Frame command.