I’m working on music that has two measures on a third page (after I changed some settings in layout to reduce how much was on the third page), but it looks to me like if I can reduce the width of a few specific measures I should be able to get the entire score down to two pages. However, the only thing I can find is changing the width of empty measures and even that doesn’t seem to affect the contents and placement of what is in the measures. Is there a way to change the width of specific measures and have Dorico automatically reformat?
You can adjust the note spacing within a single measure with the Note Spacing tool.
Once you select this tool, in Engrave mode, you’ll see blue handles over each note and barline. To “condense” a bar, select all of the note handles in that bar and use the shortcuts for moving items graphically to move them closer together. If you want to also proportionately move the right barline, select the handle over that item as well.
To reset the spacing, select all the handles and press Backspace or Delete.
One issue with adjusting spacing in this way is that it will automatically add system breaks at the start and end of the current system – which goes against your goal of reflowing measures. (You can delete the system breaks, though.)
Another approach, rather than adjusting individual measures, is to change the note spacing for a larger region, to make everything a little smaller. You can do this for the whole layout (in Layout Options > Page Setup > Note Spacing), or from a selected position, like the top of p.2 (using Engrave > Note Spacing Change). Making the “Default space for quarter note” a little bit smaller will affect the spacing from that point forward and may be enough to let Dorico reflow everything the way you want it.
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You can always force any amount of music onto one page by inserting a Frame Break on top of p.2, and setting the property ‘wait for next frame break’. If there’s no frame break in the rest of the piece, everything that follows will be squeezed on that page. Of course, if that’s really far more than Dorico can reasonably handle, things might not look too good after all. A note spacing change may be a more careful approach.
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I have tried the note spacing, but discovered that dorico put in a bracket & barline change on its own (see the image). And that change split one measure into two halves. It also is part of the reason that the score spills over to a third page (after I changed some spacing in the layout). But if I delete that bracket and barline change the bracket just returns but the measure is still split. (see the 2nd image below). Or is there some other command or setting that will re-combine the two halves of the measure?
It looks like you added a mid-measure coda – is that what you meant to do?
Can you share the project file here? It’s easier to see what’s going on than looking at screenshots.
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No I did not intentionally add a mid-measure coda. I’ve uploaded what I believe is the current version of the file.
People Tryin to Live in Time fixing lyrics etc.dorico (1.3 MB)
That Coda is indeed mid-measure. I think you want to drag it one beat to the right, so that it starts in m.64. And it looks like the To Coda should be at the end of m.36, not in m.38.
You’ve already got that spacing value at 3.5. I can get the whole thing onto 2 pages if I change the note spacing of the whole piece to 3 1/8, but to my eyes the pages look too crowded.
A better approach might be to change the space to rastral 5, which is just slightly smaller than the size you currently have. This lets the whole piece fit on 2 pages without any note spacing changes.
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In the Finale version the To Coda 2nd time was shown at the bar line between measures 37 and 38, intending to mean that the second time you get to the end of measure 37 you jump to the coda, but there was also a vertical dashed line at between measures 37 and 38. I did delete the coda identification and just redefined it. Not sure how it ended up where it was, but it’s correct now.
Thank you for your help.
Also, please explain what is meant by the term rastral for spacing. I did set it to restral 5 as you suggested, but I really don’t know what it means and would like to understand it.
The Latin word raster literally means ‘rake’, which was quite what the 5-point burin looked like that music engravers used to draw staves in a metal plate in the olden days. There were a bunch of different standard sizes, numbered from 1 (quite big) to 8 (rather tiny). They defined the space size, which is the distance between two lines of a staff, and which dictates all other measurements and symbol sizes in a score. Nowadays, we’re not bound to 8 fixed standard rastrals anymore, but I think it’s nice Dorico retained the traditional terminology.
Edit: @StevenJones01 beat me to it, but I’d like to comment that the image he (or Wikipedia) gives doesn’t show a burin (engraving tool), but a 5-point pen tip, used by composers/copyists to draw staves with ink on paper. I guess it’s also called rastrum.
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