How does one fix a collision like this? There are collisions like this in many measures on multiple staves on one single page of a tall multi page orchestral score, so I am afraid to change global settings and lose all of the engraving edits I’ve done up until now. Is this a rastral thing, or something else?
I forced one measure on to the following page via make into frame in engraving. It freed up space on that page. I don’t know if that was the best way to do things, but it worked!
If so, then you are probably trying to squash too much material onto one page. You can try using note spacing changes to cure local difficulties, but their effectiveness will be limited if you have lots of frame/system breaks.
If you find yourself making lots of engraving edits, then you probably have the wrong (inappropriate) global settings in place.
You can always experiment on a clean copy of your score to see what global options work best.
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Thanks, this was Dorico’s automatic settings, I didn’t create any page breaks up until here. I will not touch this piece because i’m afraid to mess everything up and time is $, but in a future project I will keep that in mind.
I seriously doubt Dorico would allow collisions like that, unless it was constrained by some manual intervention.
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Well I don’t know what to tell you. This is the first time I have formatted a score created fully in Dorico. After choosing a rastral size I went into engrave mode and only changed condensing, nothing else, before discovering these collisions (about 20 on the page, looked like a finale file). Before fixing it, I didn’t know how to create frame breaks (or what a frame is for that matter; still don’t understand why it’s called frame instead of page).
If you’re familiar with any desktop publishing software (InDesign, Publisher, etc.),. a frame is a box on a page into which you can put text or graphics. It’s the same in Dorico, except that a frame can also hold music. If you look at your page templates, you’ll see that they contain several text frames, for things like titles and page numbers, and a music frame for the music on that page. A page can actually have multiple music frames, which is why it’s called a frame break instead of a page break – it sends music into the next frame, which may or may not be the next page.
Can you post your project file here, or a part of it, so we can see what’s going on? Most likely, there’s some combination of settings that’s causing Dorico’s spacing algorithm to misbehave, because it can’t satisfy all of your requirements at once.
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Thanks for the info. There are actually many words in Dorico that I don’t understand (think FLOW, which I guess I understand now, though I don’t get the reasoning behind making flows the default). I am not familiar with desktop publishing software, nor do I know what that is.
I can’t post any part of this work as I don’t know the copyright rules surrounding it and don’t want to bother my employer. It’s fine, if it happens again with my personal music that I can post then I will do so.
An orchestral score is going to need a small staff size and a large page size, in order to fit large numbers of staves on the page.
It’s worth paying attention to the “fullness” percentage indicators in Engrave mode, which will show you how full your page is (vertically) and your system is, horizontally.
Music comes in chunks, called flows. You have to have one, at least.
You don’t know what desktop publishing software is…?
Using a computer to create and design text and images on a page, which can then be printed, has been one of the foremost tasks of computers these last 40 years or so.
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Thanks for the response. I will definitely try out your advice on my next orchestral score. Like I said I am afraid to touch anything now that it is “good enough”. Mainly because I spent a lot of time fiddling with condensing changes, as there were tons of mistakes that needed correcting.
As for flows, ok, but they didn’t exist in finale and I somehow survived. Out of hundreds of projects, I have only once ever done several where they would have been useful. I am sure they are useful to some people but as of now, most of the music I have orchestrated, arranged and composed has come in one single chunk. So for my workflow (also a new word I have never heard until this forum… looks like a neologism that’s trending heavy) flows are not the default. I hope I can use them soon though, because it looks way more manageable than finale’s cumbersome work-arounds.
Is it that strange to not know what desktop publishing software is? I don’t particularly care about computers and their programs outside of what directly interests me: music notation, listening to music, watching movies and communication with others. I bet I know things you don’t know, and I wouldn’t judge you for not knowing them 
At most, you have to set “Show Flow Headings” to “Never” in Layout Options, set that as your default, and you won’t have to worry about flows at all.
It’s been around for 100 years or so.
Of course we all know different things, and have blind spots, but for someone employed to produce paged material for someone else (albeit music), it is surprising, yes.
But apologies.
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Yeah thanks, got that trick to hide the flow headings.
For the word “workflow” I used etymonline as my source and they say it’s around since 1949 BUT heavy usage is in the last 20 years. I am an native anglophone but have lived in a non-english speaking country for 15 years, and for most of my life until recently I had no use for such a word, having worked in the service industry and as a gigging musician.
There is surely a sizeable portion of the written music producing musical world nowadays that doesn’t delve much further into computers than the bare minimum to deliver a legible product. I know several people just like myself, who make a living composing and orchestrating but who just know the basics of how to write in a program. I can’t tell you if they know what desktop publishing programs are, but I doubt it…
Adrian, just to give you the best hint for your future projects (projects being compositions you put into your new Notation Application Dorico):
I know, you prefer to leave your present project behind, but it will tell you something for all your future projects - especially as you discovered this uncomfortable squashing/collision of elements:
1.) Open that score in Engrave Mode again.
2.) Look at the very bottom. You will see a percentage shown.
3.) Look at the right of your systems. You will also see a percentage there.
These percentages will show in red or green, red if they are over 100%, green if they are below or up to 100%.
If a red percentage is shown, it shows something tells Dorico to override its default Layout settings. This can be the paper size you choose, it can be your choice if displaying the score without or with condensing, and other things. It also means, it is in your hands to correct something. Either by choosing a different paper size for that layout, removing imported “page breaks” i.e. Frame breaks or System breaks.
This is, what Ben mentioned with “fullness” at the beginning of his answer to you:
Good to know; it’s all green.
I did very little in terms of adjustments. I had no knowledge of how to adjust anything as this is the first score I have “engraved” in dorico, and didn’t know what frames or frame breaks were prior to this. I set the rastral size, turned on condensing, set big time signatures, and started correcting the condensing problems. That’s it!
I imagine I should have started with a proper page size. It will be printed on A3 so I should have chosen that perhaps? The current selection is quarto (metric demy). The result seems to be excessively wide margins all around. But when I tried to change the page size post editing, things got wonky, and again, I don’t want to mess everything up.
Actually I haven’t done the parts yet. Would you suggest setting parts page size to A4 before editing them, as they will be printed on A4?
Otherwise I found another collision today in the condensed bassoon 1+2 staff:
Remember, you are working with individual layouts. You can just duplicate your score layout, then do changes in that layout. If you don’t like your improvements, you can delete that layout again.
And yes, choosing an appropriate paper size for the score layout is an essential step.
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Oh cool, didn’t think of that duplication possibility. Thanks!
Yes and yes, it is a good idea to set the page size for score and parts to match their destination size!!!
Make sure you have signposts visible, especially for breaks. Some features (like push that bar into previous page) create breaks with specific properties and newcommers are often surprised by Dorico’s behavior because *they don’t know there is a break with those settings — Wait for next… — at those points!
The breaks signposts are pink, if you click on one, you’ll see its properties in the bottom panel (cmd-8 to toggle it on/off).
Your first picture clearly shows that horizontal space is too scarce, bars have been squished manually, even if you don’t know how it happened 
Delete breaks (or press Reset Layout in Engrave mode left panel to delete them all in one go) and you’ll see what Dorico does on its own. It is usually the best option to start with.
Hope it helps!
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