Hello everyone, I hope this topic hasn’t come up yet as I couldn’t see any related search result.
When I first tried with the new divisi function, there were empty spaces everywhere as the system couldn’t fill up the whole page, so I did some rearrangement with the staff spacing in Engrave mode. But then, somehow in the first few pages of my project where all the divisi lines are, no matter how many times I tidy them up in the Engrave mode with staff spacing, they are all messed up every time I reopen the file. It only happens where there are divisi parts.
Does anyone know how to fix this? It does put me off quite a bit as I know when I want to continue to work on it, I will have to tidy those few pages up again and again.
It’s getting worse as I play around… Just created a title page and then it messes up yet further.
This is what happened:
All first 7 pages (where all the divisi are) messed up
Tidied up nicely with staff spacing in Engrave mode, saved file, reopened file, messed up again
Created title page, then those 7 pages showed up nicely, except all were shrunk to the upper half of the page
Played around with staff spacing again but only with page 2 of the score, saved, reopened, that very page was messed up again, exactly as step 2
Also, there are pages with only 2 systems on them, some of them are spaced equally out, nicely. But some of them aren’t as they have shrunk to the upper half of the pages, which means I have to resize the staff spacing again.
Well, I took a look and did some work. It turns out that you did use the staff spacing tools to excess. All of the red squares in pic 1 show that a great deal of staff moving activity occurred.
Using raster size three for a full score is generally not great either, So I took the liberty of removing two of your page overrides, getting rid of all your system and page breaks, and setting the score to raster size 6. It may not be what you would like, but there are far too few notes on a page otherwise. It looks way better.
The fact that you had page breaks at almost every page is indicative that the staff size was inappropriate for the paper size and the size of the ensemble. Using these tools are fine, that’s why they are available to us, bu excessive use generally means they one is employing a flawed layout strategy to begin with. The Dorician who overrides least, smiles most!
My messed-up layout is much less annoying, but I would still like to correct it. I set up my violin soloist as a single players, just because it seemed logical. When I came to the cadenza, I needed to represent its counterpoint, so I invoked divisi, and used this with, occasionally, difficulty in producing slurs from an upper note to a lower one but no insoluble problems. I came to the end of this section and inadvertently continued in the lower part in which I entered over 600 notes, with a fair proportion of slurs and articulations, before noticing the bar rest symbols that occur above lower parts but not below upper ones. I also realised that all stems were down in this passage, though when I copied a bar to an undivided part they were correctly oriented. I would therefore like either to transfer the lower part into the upper one or to end the divisi. I have tried copying out, selecting upper part and copying back, which puts it back in the lower part, and ending divisi by the sequence “edit”, “staff”, “restore unison”, which, bizarrely, produces the message, “The selected instrument is held by a solo player. You can only create a divisi change for an instrument held by a section player” (so what did I do?). Getting rid of the unwanted rests would be a start, but the stem orientation is itself a waste of space, as the part ranges either above or below the stave, but not both, in many bars.
I don’t think “divisi” is the right word for what you did. You can’t create a Divisi for solo players, only for a section players. When you came to the cadenza I think you use two voices on solo player’s staff.
To get rid of the rests and stems in the wrong direction, select the passage, right click, and do Voices > Change Voice > Upstem voice 1. That should put everything back into the default voice, and since there is only one voice the stem directions will be set automatically.
If that doesn’t make sense, please attach a picture of the score (or even better, the Dorico file) so we don’t have to guess what you actually did.
