Hi all, I’m to the point where I am importing a handful of old finale files that need updating. Today’s project is fixing a few things in the “Thriller” chart I use with my band. (uploaded it here) Thriller.dorico (1.2 MB)
There are a number of things that I didn’t love about the import and how dorico is formatting it, but primarily it looks like dorico isn’t spacing the systems very well.
You can see in the screen grab that there are many overlaps in the spacing, and one spot where the spacing is too open, right after the first system.
Is this something that was imported from the XML and all the manual adjusting i had to do in finale? How to I tell dorico to use the normal spacing rules I’ve defined in the layout/engraving options?
Not an exhaustive tutorial, just a few ideas I tried in your file to try and fit it better on the page:
(BTW: I got a warning about fonts used in the project, but missing on my system. I ignored [OK’d] this dialog. Of course, missing fonts may affect all kinds of spacing everywhere.)
I changed all frame breaks at the start of each page into system breaks. However, I changed the system break at the start of the Coda to a frame break (it feels like a natural separation, and the Coda seemed to fit nicely on 1 page). I left all other system breaks in place. I guess they came from Finale, and aren’t too bad.
In Layout Options → Page Setup, I changed the Rastral (staff size) from the rather spacious #3 to a reasonable #4. This affects basically everything on the page.
In Engraving Options, under Lyrics, I changed the distance between lines of lyrics from 1 to ½ space. You probably have some other font in use there, maybe it won’t work well with that.
These few basic adjustments already made a huge difference: no collisions between lyrics and staves or chord symbols anymore. The score starts to look a lot more manageable.
Hope this helps a bit, as a starting point for how you’d solve these things in Dorico. Rule of thumb: always start with the global settings, don’t start tweaking local peculiarities.
Thank you Peter. Those did help out a bit, although I still have a few collisions, namely between lyrics and some repeat endings. I’ll see what it takes to sort those out.
I’m not sure why this imported weirdly, other than maybe the template I used had some weird spacings or manual adjustments?
