I am trying to edit a simple song. As I edit and add things like chords and chord diagrams the number of staves on a page doesn’t change. Everything is crowded together, and I cant edit without clicking on items sitting on top of one another. I tried changing vertical spacing minimums on the layout options, but that doesn’t change anything. If I expand the space between staves manually, the remaining staves get crowded down to the bottom of the page.
This is a beginner question. I have looked at the documentation and forum entries, but nowhere have I found an explanation of how the program decides to move music over to the next page and how you can influence that. This should be one of the first things explained, but I can’t find it anywhere.
The red lines here are indicators showing that you have moved the systems around manually. That’s why Dorico doesn’t do automatic layout on the page anymore. This is also why changing the layout options did nothing for you. Once you do manual overrides, Dorico stops moving things around.
In the Engrave menu, find Staff spacing → Reset layout. That will remove your manual edits and let the music flow onto the next page.
And since you said you’re a beginner, I’ll give you a very common piece of advice: Avoid using manual spacing adjustments. They’re a tool that’s good to have available, but it’ll almost always be easier and quicker to get things to look the way you want by finding the right settings in Layout Options, Notation options and Engraving Options.
(And as you’ve found out: once you do a manual adjustment, Dorico stops trying to place things automatically since that would mess with your manual edits. So if you want to do manual edits, make sure to leave that until the end of your work, when everything is finished.)
Thanks. I set the layout options to ‘factory’ and did the reset under spacing on the Engrave menu. That just got me back to where I started. I only started moving things manually after I couldn’t get things to change by setting vertical spacing defaults in the layout options in the library menu. Here is the file now.
Also note that Layout Options are separate for each Layout. That might seem obvious, but it’s easy to miss when you’re new. You had huge spacings in your Tenor & Acoustic Guitar layout, and things much closer together in the score. Maybe you were adjusting the settings for one and looking at the other and that’s the reason you weren’t seeing any changes?
