Fermata Placement

I think dragging the fermata off the page from the tenor part (and from the score) is the right move for this. Thanks for the tip.

Out of curiosity, will that fermata reappear when you reopen the project? Seems a risky business to me.

Romanos, out of interest, does the attached file open on your machine with pauses looking like this?

If so, I think you’re question’s answered…
pausa.dorico.zip (710 KB)

Why should it reappear? If everything that you moved in Engrave mode reverted to its original position when you reopened a project, that wouldn’t be very useful! Dorico doesn’t “know” it’s off the page, it only knows that you moved it.

Rob, fair point, and yes, pianoleo, it looks correct.

My only fear was that Dorico would say “out of bounds! you get back here” and then put it on the edge of the page or something.

In addition to your stated concerns, I would also be concerned about those players that are resting the entire measure. If they are playing in the next measure (not shown), I would want to show their whole rests with the fermatas all the way at the left of the measure. That way it should be clear that there will be beats after the fermata before they play. And if I expected that entrance to be particularly problematic, I’d want to show their fermata over an 8th rest so that they would know to expect to see beats 2 and 3 before the next measure.

Of course, that all assumes they are playing in the next measure. If not, it isn’t as important.

I guess this is all possible with Dorico, but the easier, the better. Rests are as important as notes.

As a related matter, I find it is impossible to place a caesura at the end of a measure without breaking a multi-measure rest. See the attached example.

If I attach it to the first beat of 17, the MM rest is correct, but the caesura appears after the Bmaj7 chord. And I can’t even drag it to where it needs to be.

Yes, I’m afraid you’re right. This is something we plan to improve in future.

Also note that this is an example where because of the stacking issue (I think), the music encroaches on the top margin, so I have to move the staff manually.

You don’t have to move the music manually: you can also select the music frame in Engrave mode and override its top margin if you prefer.

But the music is extending OUTSIDE the frame, isn’t it? That’s not supposed to happen, is it?

It looks to me like Dorico is placing the staves before considering the collisions and not adjusting when the collision avoidance pushes elements outside the frame.

The music is not extending outside the frame. Some staff text (or possibly system text) is extending outside the frame, which it IS allowed to do.

This has come up quite a bit. The issue at hand is that Dorico wants the first staves in each frame to line up, so it excludes things like rehearsal marks and text from the top margin. Personally I’d like the ability to turn that off (since a rehearsal mark colliding with a header is more problematic than systems that don’t line up), but that’s the current functionality.

WHAT !!!???

I don’t follow that. Why would we go to the trouble of defining frames and then allow the music (OK the text items that are part of the music) to go outside the frame. The text and notes COLLECTIVELY are the music. The music is not just the dots and the stems. Even if somebody wants to argue that text items aren’t part of th emusic, surely the tempo marks are.

Going back over my most recent project, this indeed explains why I had to do so much moving around of staves, leading to the kind of problems described up-thread. But really, it makes no sense for any elements to be cast outside the frame, IMHO.

Tempo marks and system text don’t need to be within the frame, but chord symbols do get placed within the frame !?

Obviously not every page would have tempo marks or system text on the first staff, so if you work around this problem by moving the frame down, that will mess up the pages that don’t have those things on the first staff, so I guess we could maintain two different sets of master pages etc etc. This doesn’t seem like a very good solution.

But the first system DOES NOT line up anyway if one section has chords and the next doesn’t have chords, does it?

I agree with you that there is no point in lining up the first systems if that means that things like rehearsal marks, tempos and system text collide with the elements in the page header frames. I can’t get my head around the concept of a music frame that doesn’t actually contain the stuff that is supposed to be in the frame.

Maybe that makes sense for hymnals or something, but I really can’t think of any engraving job where it is desirable to have things collide with the header.

Any piece of professional looking engraving that I have seen has the same spacing between the top STAFF LINES and the top of the page on every page, regardless of how much notation (leger lines, articulations, slurs, text, etc) is above the top staff lines.

That is what Dorico does. You can’t expect the best choice for the size of the margin between the top of the music frame and the top staff to be a “one size fits all” default value for every possible score. If it’s too small for your scores, just change it in the layout options.

If you want to produce an amateurish looking mess with more music crammed onto the page than will fit properly, then maybe Dorico isn’t the best program to do that.

Craig, your Giant Steps example has all the hallmarks of a first page to me: it starts at bar 1, there’s a tempo indication, there’s a staff indent on the first line etc.

By default, Dorico DOES use two master pages: one for first pages and another for everything else (and Flow Headers achieve the same gaps as found on default First pages).

I don’t know what master page you’re using, here, but by not using an actual title (“Giant Steps”) in an actual text frame, you’ve got yourself into a situation where there are three pieces of text stacked directly on top of each other - four, if you include the multirest.

You got yourself into this mess. Why should Dorico get you out of it?

Let’s not pile on other users who make different choices about formatting their music, please, folks.

I understand the request to have Dorico enforce that nothing should be allowed to go out of the top of the music frame, even if it means having a “ragged top” to successive pages, and I certainly don’t rule it out as something we could add in future.

But being able to keep the layout of the top staff of the top system and the bottom staff of the bottom system consistent is something that is important in most published music, and it’s certainly true that we have optimised Dorico to produce results consistent with fine publishing by default.

The default options we chose for music frame margins are pretty good general-purpose defaults, but you may need to adjust them in the event that you tend to have a lot of music in a very high register on the top staff of the ensemble, or if you tend to need to add lots of markings above the staff on a regular basis.

No. The first page has additional information, such as title, composer, arranger, large format for part name, copyright, etc. This is clearly not a first page. It is a flow I am starting on its own page because it needs to go in a binder interspersed with other documents.

The upshot is that if I want to use the master page approach to working around this problem – that I did not create – I will have to have two variations of master pages – those that have elements that fall outside the master frame and those that don’t.

It is disappointing because Dorico has the potential to save a lot of time in the final layout , and actually has saved me a lot of time on most projects. But this one has taken me hours – not just because of this frame business, but because the staff movement leads to some other really nasty stuff – also not of my making.

By now, I feel like I have invested about 10 times more in the learning curve than most potential buyers of Dorico are willing to do. I have complied a 50-page document of tips and techniques that I have gathered over the months. Without that, I would not have made it this far. I know some people object to the characterization of the product as “beta level”, but this is an illustration of why I say that. It does many things brilliant and has the promise of being a great leap forward, but there are still enough basic problems that it will present a real challenge for anybody who is not a real enthusiast.

I have 1000 pieces of published music in my room. I just pulled out 25 at random and 7 of them did not do what you say.