Suppose I have a score in which one of the parts happens to have a rest as the first bar on a page. I would like to nudge that bar onto the previous page. What’s the best way to do that?
The obvious way (at least to me) is to select the bar with the rest in Engrave mode and say “move to previous system.” However, that creates a system break after the bar in question and a second system break at the beginning of the system to which I have moved that bar. If I now do something that changes the length of the music before these breaks, it messes up the appearance of the changed music.
What I would like is a way to select the bar with the rest and tell Dorico “Please do not put a page break immediately before this bar if you can possibly help it.” In effect, for engraving purposes, I would like to treat this bar and the one before it as if they constitute a single bar.
Not exactly what you asked for, but
Perhaps create a note spacing change after the rest with no change in settings, then another note spacing change a few bars before with a smaller value until the rest fits the page.
It seems to me that approach would have a similar (but less severe) side effect to manually inserting system breaks: If the music subsequently changes, the spacing change would remain and affect the spacing of that music even when there is no longer any advantage in doing so.
It also seems to me that another way to achieve the same effect with fewer side effects would be to find pages that begin with rests and manually insert a system break immediately after the first bar of each such page; then, if necessary, reducing music spacing slightly to force that bar onto the previous page without locking the entire preceding system.
But I really wish there were a way of solving these problems by prohibiting (or discouraging) system breaks at particular points rather than by forcing them.
I guess I’m thinking about the LaTeX typesetting system, which gives you a way of taking several consecutive words and saying that they constitute a “block”–in effect, telling the system that it should not put a line break between any of those words (or attempt to hyphenate any of them). Thus, for example, if you make a block out of “J. S. Bach,” you can be assured that the name won’t be split across a line boundary.
Hi, @arkoenig, another method to let the rest bar stay in the first page without system breaks (and Wait for new system break), would be to use, instead, Frame Breaks at the desired beginning of the two pages, setting the second NSP to reset, and then reducing the “quarter value” of the Note spacing change at the beginning of the first page, until the desired bars are all in the one desired first page. This would mitigate the “messing up if you change the music before”, grouping the music only inside the whole frame, instead on individual systems:
This idea makes sense, and in fact I wound up doing something like that independently.
However, after this experience, I think it is reasonable to suggest that the Dorico developers consider adopting a “keep these measures together” feature. This would be a suggestion rather than a command, just as (I think) it is possible for Dorico to break a measure across a system boundary if there’s no other way to get the music to fit.
Even better would be if Dorico were to adopt a TeX-like algorithm for inserting system and frame breaks. Basically, the idea is to assign a “badness score” to every possible place in which a system or frame break might occur. For example, a break at a repeat bar might have a low badness score, a break in the middle of a tie or a slur might have a high badness score, a frame break immediately after a rest would have a low badness score, a frame break immediately before a rest might have a higher badness score (but not as high as one between two measures with music on both sides), and so on.
Then the idea would be to go through the entire flow (or maybe even all the flows) and figure out where to insert breaks so as to minimize the sum of the squares of the badness scores. In his writings on TeX, Don Knuth describes a fairly straightforward, efficient algorithm for achieving this state of affairs.
The resulting strategy produces books that are visually more attractive than those typeset with more naive algorithms; I suspect the same algorithm could make life easier for Dorico users as well.
