Hello,
I am trying to line up the staffs at the beginning of these systems, but the instrument labels are messing with the look of this page. Is there a way to move the words “secondo” and “primo” to the left so the staffs will line up? I have tried changing the spacing in layout options and also looked through multiple discussions on the forum, but whatever I change in layout options don’t seem to change anything in the score. Thanks in advance!
Welcome to the forum, @chiweimemoir !
There’s not a native way to do this in Dorico, but in your case I think you can fake it.
In Layout Options > Staves and Systems > Staff Labels, set “Staff labels on first system” to Full and “Staff labels on subsequent systems” to Abbreviated.
In Setup mode, expand the player card for each player, then click on the three dots next to the instrument name and choose “Edit Names”. Change the abbreviated name to the same thing as the full name, and then set the text color of the abbreviated name to white.
Now systems after the first will have the same length staff label as the first system, but you won’t see the label because the text is white.
Thanks @ asherber for the detailed demonstration! I see that you moved every instrument label to the right, and it works. Since the page I attached above is in the middle of the piece, is there a way to line up the staffs to the left instead of to the right?
asking because I don’t really want to lose one measure/system. Thanks again!
The constraints here are that nothing in Dorico can extend outside the page margin, and the music (and staff labels) can’t extend outside the music frame. So if the second and fourth systems in your example (no labels) are up against the left edge of the frame, there’s no way to move the first and third systems to the left, because then the labels would need to stick outside of the frame. (And the frame is probably up against the margin.)
There’s some discussion about this issue, along with other possible workarounds, in this thread. But I think the bottom line is that if you want your systems to line up, the left edge of the systems will be determined by the length of the longest displaying staff label.
Everything will always be in side the margin. You can set a minimum indent value, so that all systems will have align with bar 77; but you will lose a lot of space for the music.
If you want much less space between the edge of the page and the labels, reduce the margin.
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