Ben is right: Layout options >Page Setup > Page number : 2 makes your layout start on page 2. You can add your first page in a pdf app if you need, and none of your work will suffer.
To be clear: I’ve never found a good way of adding title pages within Dorico after tweaking staff spacing in the body of the score. Staff Spacing is stored with the page, not with the music. If page 1 becomes page 2, the Staff Spacing doesn’t move with the staves. Thus the music that used to be on page 1 gets the staff spacing adjustments that were attached to the music that used to be on page 2.
This has been discussed at length previously.
what is a ‘prelim’ page?
I made many manual changes in staff-spacing and I’d just like that they stay on the same page where they are when I’m adding some pages in the beginning.
Could you please tell me exactly how to achieve that? I’m lost to be honest.
exactly…so there is no way to avoid it except adding pages with another program and ‘join’ the PDFs of Dorico and the other program?
That’s very bad news and VERY ‘Un-Handy’.
ahhh…very cool thanx Marc and Ben…PERFECT !!!
Well, given Leo’s answer, I am wondering whether I am wrong on this matter. Test it before you send to a client!
No, Marc, you’re absolutely right. Changing a page number in Layout Options is purely cosmetic; that action alone won’t affect existing staff spacing adjustments at all.
I meant that I haven’t found a good way of adding prefatory information in Dorico after finalising the body of the score. I mean, sure, you could add a new layout and stick your prefatory pages in there, but you’ll still need to stitch two PDFs together outside of Dorico.
Got the point…so you need an external PDF in any case…no way to avoid it without loosing the staff spacing…
Thanks Leo for this confirmation. I am relieved to know this actually works.
I’m wondering if there’s any update to this issue as of the 3.1 and 3.5 versions of Dorico? I’m having the same problem of changing a system or frame break and having it mess up the staff spacing for the rest of my score. I unfortunately got the staff spacing for the second half of this score perfect but then had to make some changes to the first half of the piece, which changed all the spacings for the second half 
I saw someone posted that the staff spacing info is stored with the page, not with the music–so if the music changes pages, the staff spacing changes? But does anyone have any suggestions/workarounds for dealing with this in terms of workflow? Is the only solution to just only do the engraving at the very end of my process and engrave only from beginning to end?
I think the consensus is that the best way to handle spacing is through a combination of spacing settings in the Layout Options that let Dorico handle the spacing in a pleasing way and various sets of Master Pages to handle pages that need more specialized treatment.
What one wants to minimize is page overrides, which indeed stay with the physical page even as the flow of the music changes to put the music on different physical pages of the layout.
Is there any way how to insert a non-hyphenated lyrics (e.g. one single word centred below 3 sixteen notes), without any effect on the horizontal spacing of the score in Dorico 3.5.1.?
Hi Milos.
In Layout options>Note spacing, you could deselect “Make space for lyrics”. But that’s layout dependant. The whole layout! so you might not want to deactivate this… I’m sorry, I could not think of a granular option
I’d try assigning the word to the middle sixteenth and then making any fine adjustments in Engrave mode.
Hi there
I seem to recall you can set a Note Spacing change that doesn’t take account of lyrics (there’s a tick box), which you could put in place for the relevant notes only.
I’m away from the computer right now so can’t check this out. I’m also not sure what would happen if the lyric itself extended beyond the region in which it was attached: would the neighbouring region make space for it, or not?
Anyway worth an investigation.
Hope it helps
Jeremy
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Yes ! You are absolutely right, I think that’s one of the “new” things added in 3 or 3.5… This note spacing change tool in Engrave mode is pure joy. I don’t use it enough, but I know it’s really great, as I could really “copy” engraved scores with a lot of finesse using it. And as a matter of fact, there’s a “Make space for lyrics” box that could be left unticked for as long as this notespacing change would take place — lets say three sixteenths 
Simply reset after those.
Thanks guys, I didn’t notice these two great note spacing features before.
After having to redo a large project several times because of staves which have reset themselves (despite my using lock systems and frames as I worked through the score), I’ve now resorted to printing chunks into PDF as I go, in order to collate them later. This 2500-bar file was a MusicXML import, so maybe I’ll cope better when I create a score de nuovo.
You probably know this already, but if you’ve moved staves manually, those changes are attached to the page, not to the systems themselves, so if the music gets moved to a different page, you’ll lose your manual staff spacing or, worse yet, other staves will be respaced which didn’t need it. Avoiding this means first of all having good settings so as to avoid as much manual positioning as possible and, secondly, doing the respacing as the very last action.
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Thanks, Vaughan. Despite having used Dorico for well over a year, I hadn’t got to grips with this matter at all, and when I started I had such a low-powered computer that it took aeons for any settings to be applied, so I couldn’t easily experiment. But this very day I went into Layout Options, reset my whole score’s settings and breaks, and played around with the vertical spacing settings. The effect of that is to create a score which - so far - is almost exactly what I want, without playing around with any manual interventions whatsoever. It’s been a long time, but now I finally get it!
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