First, I have to say the condensing feature is amazingly improved after the last time I experimented with it. It is just fantastically usable now. Thank you so much, Dorico team!
I still have a problem when I need to move instruments from staff to staff, this often happens with horn parts, for example, moving horns 1,2,3 to the upper staff and horn 4 on the lower staff. I can only get these changes to happen at frame or system breaks. For frequent changes, this is a real problem because that’s what starts determining how many measures are on a page.
Am I missing something, or is this a current limitation?
You are correct that you cannot move a player from one staff to another within a system. This would be theoretically possible for changes in player disposition that don’t require the number of staves to change, and we have certainly seen it done in a few scores, but it’s incredibly complicated to achieve, unfortunately. While we do still have a number of significant functional areas to address with condensing, this isn’t something we’re seriously considering for the future.
Thanks for the quick reply Daniel. I’m very sorry to hear it’s so difficult to do. I hope someday it will move up on your list, however. Perhaps a couple of years down the road, it might be possible to tackle this? I hope? Here’s one for your notebook, just FYI:
That’s not horrible, but not really acceptable to us. After trying many different versions, we’ve decided to put a 15 8va basso under the pickup. It looks very strange, but at least it is readable:
You mean in the third horn part, I assume? There are problems with that because we would have to change the 3rd horn note (this score uses old-style bass clef notation), which means tracking it in the part and we are concerned about error creep.
Just another thought - would it be possible to add a super manual mode at some point so we can tweak the decisions made by the algorithm? Move notes from staff to staff or make clef decisions and such? Perhaps that could be done more easily? Just as we can tweak the note spacing algorithm and etc.
