Inter-system gap

Hey all,

I really enjoyed John Barron’s recent tutorial on this. However, See the example below -

What I want is for the page on the right to have the same inter system gap as that on the left.

When the justification rule is on it automatically allocates a 26.5mm gap. As soon as I use mathematics to recreate that rough gap using intersystem spaces, it knocks the bottom stave onto the next page, while still a good few milimeters short of the 26.5mm

I’d like desperately fo Dorico to be able to automatically keep this distance without reverting to just typing the values in in Engrave mode. I don’t think I’m doing anything wrong here am I?

Best
Edd

N.b when “fill the rest with blank manuscript” is selected it lines up beautifully…

What happens if you deactivate “Automatically resolve collisions between adjacent staves and systems” in the Minimum Gaps section, then set the braced staff and inter-system gaps as required?

The quickest solution I can think of to get the same system spacing on the 2nd page is to raise the bottom of the frame on that page until they match.

That’s done it Lillie - thanks!

That would work, but I’m looking for a solution without overriding anything

General point - why do we define the inter-system gap in spaces? Why can’t we just use millimeters?

Tl;dr It makes sense for spacing gaps to scale along with staff/space size.

The various spacing values are scaled accordingly if your staff space happens to be smaller (e.g. where ossia staves are concerned or you have to override the space size for a system, frame or flow). If these were defined in mm then that scaling would be opaque.

Logistically it’d also be a pig if you happened to change your mind about the global staff size of a layout - I imagine there’d be various people saying “I intentionally set all my spacing gaps to 15mm and then I adjusted my staff size and now those spacing gaps are 18.24mm - why?”. Or if the gaps didn’t automatically scale when you changed the global start size, people would grumble that they had to do extra work to get their score looking right.

Ok…. I do understand the value of relative values, but when you know an absolute value, why not be able to specify it? We do the same for text. It would be handy to be able to enter the value as millimetres and have it converted to spaces, for e.g without doing the maths. It would also be great if you didn’t have to express space values as a fraction for the same reason: precision. Granted, these values will change with stave size…

If you prefer to think in decimals, type decimals. Dorico will automatically convert them to fractions.

That does work, and results in some ridiculous fractions!