I’m coming over from Finale, so a lot of the formatting if very foreign to me (even if it is presumably more user friendly in the long run). I am trying to format this part to fit for a marching band sized piece. I can not figure out how to move lines from one page to another, or fit more measures in a line. Once I got to maybe 6 measures in a line, it was looking quite cramped. The instrument, title, and composer also seem to be taking up a lot of space at the top.
I’m not super tech-intuitive, so help is greatly appreciated! I’ve got a picture here of what my situation looks like. I’ve tried reading a bunch of threads on here, but they all seem to just want the person to show a picture to work on their specific case, rather than give information that can help all.
Thank you!
Welcome to the forum, @calachar!
One general rule of thumb that will help you in Dorico is to configure your settings so that Dorico formats things for you, rather than pushing things around by hand, as was more common in Finale.
Here are some suggestions:
- Right-click on the p.1 thumbnail in the right-hand panel and choose Remove Page Override
- Go to Library > Paragraph Styles and choose smaller font sizes for the Title and Layout Name styles
- Back in Engrave mode, double-click the First template and make the text frame with
{@projectTitle@} less tall
- Maybe go to Library > Layout Options > Page Setup > Page Margins, and make your margins a little smaller
- in Layout Options > Page Setup > Space Size, change the Rastral size to 6 or 7. The space size is the distance between two staff lines; changing the space size makes the staff smaller, as well as everything on or attached to the staff, which lets Dorico fit more music on a system and more systems on a page. This is like changing the system scaling in Finale.
After these changes, you should have something that looks more like a standard marching band part. Once you have one Dorico project looking the way you want it, you can save that as a project template and use that for future projects.
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asherber, thank you for all of that. The layout already looks a lot closer to what I’m wanting. While I was adjusting things, at one point a line from page 2 popped over to page 1, which is great. Is there a way to tell other lines to come over?
I’m not yet thinking I’ve got it so I can fit everything on one page which is what I need, but getting more lines to move as I want them looks like the next step.
In that same idea, is there a way to make the rehearsal makes smaller? I’ve adjusted them in the paragraph style, but the size of the box around the number seems excessively large, taking up more space.
I’ve got a picture of what it looks like now.
Thank you!
It looks like you’re still adding manual system breaks. In most cases, you shouldn’t need that, if your settings are good.
I would start by removing all those breaks – you can click the Reset Layout button if you pop out the left panel.
If you go to Layout Options > Note Spacing, you can try lowering the default space for quarter note setting – that tells Dorico to put notes closer together. Right now, you’re putting more measures in a system than Dorico wants to – you can see from the red system fullness indicators that Dorico thinks those systems are overfull. (I think you could also still use a smaller space size.)
In terms of the number of systems on a page, Dorico will put as many systems on a page as it can fit, according to your settings. You could try adjusting Layout Options > Vertical Spacing > Minimum Gaps – especially the inter-system gap setting. That tells Dorico to put less space in between systems, which allows for more systems on a page.
Right now, it looks like you adjusted the system spacing on the first page manually. When you do that, Dorico doesn’t take the “extra” space at the bottom of the page into account and won’t move systems there to fill it. That’s why it’s better to change the gap settings and let Dorico figure the rest of it out.
For the box around the rehearsal marks, take a look at Engraving Options > Rehearsal Marks > Enclosures.
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Are you certain you want the pages in Landscape view and not Portrait view?
For marching band, yes. These are to fit in a flip folder, something like this.
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