How to center music on page

Hi guys, I’m wondering if there’s a way to center-align a short piece of music. For creating teaching materials, what I’d like to do is, for example, have a flow consisting of just a bar or two, and instead of it being left-aligned with the page/frame to have it be centered on the page instead (so if I have, let’s say, two bars of equal length, the barline separating them would line up exactly with the middle of the page). Is this possible?

You could maybe just adjust the Frame size until it’s where you want?

I suppose so…but wouldn’t the actual music still be left-aligned in the frame, even if the frame is smaller?

Yes, but it would appear centred on the page. Unless I’m missing something? (It is likely)

I’ll try that, thanks, Daniel

Hmm…that didn’t really do what I’d like it to; does anybody else have an idea?

I’m struggling to picture what you’re after. Could you maybe manually adjust the spacing in Engrave Mode to show what you’re after? If not, hopefully someone can sort you out. :blush:

Is this what you want?

It will be impossible to get the bar lines to be vertically aligned unless you hide the time signature;

That looks like what I want. I would only need one system so I don’t need to worry about the barlines in different systems lining up.

Basically, I’d like to do this (see screenshot), except have that one bar centered on the page rather than left-aligned:

You can just drag the left side of the music frame in Engrave:

Or select the bar and move it with the Note Spacing Tool:

Positioning the music frame has the advantage of being able to set up page templates to automatically do what you want, but you’ve got a couple of options. For some handouts where I need different positions within the same frame, sometimes I’ll just quickly use the Note Spacing Tool, rather than set up a new music frame. It just depends on what exactly you are trying to do and whether you need it easily repeatable.

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My suggestion is to create a Page Template with the frame as you wish it. One can use the numeric fields in the Properties panel to indent the frame equally from both sides.

Then use the layout option in Note Spacing to set the “final” system to fill (justify) the entire width of the frame. (And set the indentation of the first system to zero.)
oneMeasure230126.dorico (437.5 KB)

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Awesome suggestions, thank you, guys!

Adjusting the frame size… I should have thought of that! :grin:

You could also grab a “slice” and put it in the center of a document like Powerpoint, Word, etc.: Creating graphic slices