I really need help… I am Finale Refugee and I am suffering from Engrave mode. When I moved the spacing of the staff, I found that it might be better if I resize the system smaller in order to make it look nice. I chose “Layout Option > Space Size” to resize it as it doesn’t have an option like (Resize staff/system/note like Finale individually).
When I did it. I found that every pages got mess up as it kept the originally spacing that I made previously. Dorico didn’t calculate the right proportion of resizing it.
I am quite desperate on Engraving my score. Please help me… :(((((((
before you apply the resizing, go in Engrave mode and click on the Lock layout button on the left panel in Graphic Editing.This prevents your casting-off to be changed. (but not sure if this is your issue)
Did you move the staves manually? Is suggested to do this only in few cases, and at the end of the layout process. Let Dorico do the spacing, setting your desired global options.
You can reset the manual staff spacing in Engrave mode > menu Engrave > Staff Spacing > Reset layout
If you share the Dorico Projects, we can give more specific help.
HI Christian, It doesn’t work. When I locked the spacing, Dorico did not calculate the right proportion of the spacing like on Finale. The staff crashes…
Yes I moved it manually as the spacing and copyied it to other pages and moved some staff one by one. Why I did it as it has bug on typing dynamic. I shared my concerning issue in this Facebook post but I still cannot find the solution.
That’s why I need to move the spacing individually as it really doesn’t fit what I want. I hope that Dorico can develop the “Resize Tool” like Finale…
This is the wrong way to do this in Dorico. Dorico layout capabilities are one of its strength, but it should not be used as you did in other software, as the concepts and workflow are very different, and much easier/automatic then in finale for example.
Before hoping that Dorico develop something like Finale, I strongly suggest you learn first how Dorico works.
From your Facebook video I cannot understand what you are doing and what the context is.
You didn’t attach a Dorico project, so we can only guess what you see and what you did to your Project.
Attaching a project is the fastest ways to get help and solutions!!
In my Facebook video, I would like to share the issue that the spacing between staff was quite nice but it suddenly compressed after entering some dynamics.
The reply to your FB post gave you a likely reason why this happened – when you added the dynamic, Dorico needed to increase the space below that staff, and that may have caused the system to cross some threshold for vertical spacing. Without seeing your project file, we can’t tell for sure.
What I can tell you is the same thing that @Christian_R said: you shouldn’t approach layout in Dorico the same way you did in Finale. Dorico will handle all kinds of spacing things automatically for you, according to the rules in Layout Options. If you don’t like the results you’re getting, you should first try tweaking some of those settings to change Dorico’s approach for that project; once Dorico’s automatic spacing is pretty close to what you want, then you can tweak individual staves or regions.
It was me that commented on your Facebook post a couple of weeks ago.
The long and short of it is that Finale has never made any attempt at collision avoidance: you tell it how far apart to space staves, and then if you vertically overfill the staves the onus is always on you to manually adjust them. It’s flexible and very stable, but any attempt to space things tightly is always going to mean spending time manually moving things to make them fit.
Dorico is aware of the height and width of the objects on the staves, and automatically avoids collisions in most cases. As you put objects outside the staff, e.g. dynamics, lyrics and notes on ledger lines, Dorico will automatically widen the spaces between staves, unless you tell it not to (in Library > Layout Options > Vertical Spacing). There is a vast quantity of options in that dialog. Take the time to go through them and get the spacing settings right, with notes, dynamics and text on the page. There’s no point in trying to get them right with 100 bars of empty staves, because they’re going to move once there are notes in place.
Manual staff spacing and copying staff spacing from one page to others are there as options, but really shouldn’t be needed most of the time, and unless you turn off collision avoidance between staves and systems they’ll yield reliably poor results if you then add or remove objects from the page (as manually adjusted staves are manually offset from default positions, and if you add or remove material those defaults will change to take in the new or removed material.)
Incidentally, Dorico absolutely does have a resize system function - from any System Break or Frame Break you can alter the Space Size in the Engrave mode properties panel. See the paragraph above, though - again, you should do any resizing of staves before any manual spacing of them.
In the long run the Dorico way is quicker than Finale, but it’s up to you to adapt here, not Dorico.