Force Staff Spacing Without Manual Adjustment

[windrag]

Is there a trick for forcing consistent staff spacing in the following scenario:

I have a score with both lyrics and chord symbols. Staves are spaced wonderfully, except for one staff where the chord symbols of one staff align between the lyric text in the staff above, causing the two staves to be closer together than the others. I tried adding a chord symbol at a place that forces the staves apart and then hiding it, but hiding forces the staves together again. Is there a way to make the collision-avoidance algorithm apply across the x-axis of the text style, for example, to eliminate these gaps?

I looked for an existing topic, but I haven’t found an answer using search terms that made sense. Thanks!

[dspreadbury]

No, there’s no way to prevent this from happening by default, which I think in general is a good thing. You don’t in general want there to be an invisible horizontal line running across the width of the system preventing items on adjacent staves to tuck, but obviously on some occasions that may produce a result that you would find more appropriate after some manual adjustment.

[Lillie_Harris]

If you do need to do manual adjustments, and what you want is all staves below a certain point to appear lower on the page to create a gap above, you can Alt-click and drag downwards the staff immediately below where you want the gap. This allows “concertina dragging” and moves all staves below the dragged point proportionately. Might make it a bit quicker and easier if you do really want to make this adjustment?

[windrag]

@Daniel at Steinberg

No, there’s no way to prevent this from happening by default, which I think in general is a good thing. You don’t in general want there to be an invisible horizontal line running across the width of the system preventing items on adjacent staves to tuck, but obviously on some occasions that may produce a result that you would find more appropriate after some manual adjustment.

I agree that in general you want Dorico to respect objects and allow dynamic spacing. That being said, moving staves manually is fraught with so many undesirable consequences. It would be great to be able to choose one object in the rare times that you need it and invoke a “object forces spacing” checkbox in Enraving Properties that could then be unchecked on its own, eliminating the need for moving staves manually. The selected object could be given a colored background like other functional objects so that its not “invisible.” That’s my vote.

[windrag]

@Lillie Harris

If you do need to do manual adjustments, and what you want is all staves below a certain point to appear lower on the page to create a gap above, you can Alt-click and drag downwards the staff immediately below where you want the gap. This allows “concertina dragging” and moves all staves below the dragged point proportionately. Might make it a bit quicker and easier if you do really want to make this adjustment?

Thanks for this, Lillie. This makes moving staves multiple staves much neater.

[windrag]

I got the results I wanted (not having to manually reposition staves) by adding a chord symbol in a place that would force spacing between staves and then changing it’s color to white in the Properties panel. By far the most graceful solution I’ve found so far.