Insert flow without altering staff spacing on existing flows

[kenbakerinc]

I have a doc with multiple flows. I have all the staff spacing set up precisely how I want it. The flows don’t have all the same spacing. Can I insert a new flow in the middle without any of the staff spacing in the existing flows changing?

[Christian_R]

I @kenbakerinc,

@kenbakerinc

I have all the staff spacing set up precisely how I want it. The flows don’t have all the same spacing.

if you used the manual Staff Spacing in Engrave mode, all the subsequent pages, after your inserted flow, will loose those manual spacings since those changes are anchored to page/frame positions.

It is suggested to let Dorico handle the spacings automatically.

(If you instead are referring to the Space size that you can define in the properties of a specific System/Frame breaks, they will remain even after adding a flow.)

You could insert your flow at the end of the project, so you don’t loose those spacings, and handle the page numbers manually in Engrave mode (but the flow numbering should also be done manually…, so not a great idea…)

Or if you could post your Dorico projects, I am sure we can give gut advice about obtaining an automatic staff spacing without the need of manual moving.

[Mats_Frendahl]

Interesting. I never tried it, as I work differently. But I tried it for a test, and it was just chaos.

Text moves etc., not only systems.

Why would it be a bad idea to maintain the imported score’s layout 100%? Are there some advantages as it is now that I don’t understand?

[Christian_R]

@Mats_Frendahl

Why would it be a bad idea to maintain the imported score’s layout 100%? Are there some advantages as it is now that I don’t understand?

This is a current limitation. But the Team is well aware of it:

Freezing layout

Lock Layout locks the system formatting, i.e. which bars are on which systems and which systems are in which frames. It is indeed the case that if you insert or delete pages, staff spacing adjustments are removed because the page indexes no longer match up to the sequence when the edits were made. We know that this is a big impediment to efficiency and we do plan to address this as best we can.

But see also the following post in the same thread:

Freezing layout

Dorico will retain staff spacing changes when inserting/removing pages, but there are still circumstances when your changes will be lost (e.g. if you hide/show staves on a page, or otherwise change the casting off in such a way that different numbers of staves or systems appear on the page).