Layout peculiarities, again

Ok … fine then …

:laughing: :laughing: :laughing:

I think Daniel has explained this somewhere here. If I remember correctly: there is a danger of Dorico getting into a ‘vicious circle’ with layout adjustments, so that one change means a re-calculation which changes everything, which means a re-calculation… At some point, it has to call it a day on the page, even if that’s not optimal.

It’s possible that changing the Vertical Spacing options may improve things, though there’s a balance to be struck across all the pages.

Claude, you’ve aged well…

And lookin good, Leo!

I’ve provided a few detailed explanations about this on the forum over the years, but I can’t find my most recent one. This one from March 2018 will have to do for now.

The long and the short of it is that because Dorico resolves collisions between staves within the same system, it can’t work out the final height of the system until it knows which bars are on the system (because the collision avoidance result from staff to staff will differ if different bars are on the system). But it can’t work out how many bars fit onto the system until it knows how many systems will fit in the frame, because if a system ends up in a different frame, the width of that frame could be different than the original frame in which it was cast off. If the width of the frame is different, then the casting off may be different, which means that the vertical collision avoidance result may be different, which means the height of the system may be different, which means it may not fit in the available height of the system, which means it may be pushed into the next frame, which may have a different width, which causes the music to be cast off differently… and so on and so on.

It’s an inherently circular problem. Dorico has to make some assumptions in order to come up with a final decision. Sometimes that decision results in one too many or one too few systems being assigned to a given frame. Perhaps in the future we’ll come up with a genius plan to solve this in a globally optimal way while maintaining some semblence of performance. Until then, I’m afraid a certain amount of manual formatting is going to be required.

Thank you for this and the previous explanation, Daniel. As was already stated in the thread from 2018, Dorico still provides far superior results in far less time than the alternatives.

Wouldn’t it be simpler to follow a more linear frame-by-frame logic?

  1. calculate the number of bars and the min. height of the first system in a frame
  2. calculate the remaining vertical space of a frame
  3. calculate the number of bars and the min. height of the next system in a frame
  4. if the new system’s min. height fits in the available space then go back to step 2., if not go to step 5.
  5. apply vertical justification of all systems within the frame
  6. close the frame and proceed to the next

I understand Daniel’s explanation of why Dorico makes layout mistakes from time to time, but it shouldn’t be happening in a standard score, where every frame has the same width.

… and then

  1. Get ready for users complaining that the last page of their score only contains one bar.

(I’m not sure what you mean by “a standard score”. For example, fixing the number of bars per system in the layout options is only standard for certain styles of music).

Bingo. I’ve acclimated to Dorico’s “smart” calculations regarding casting off, and I find them incomparably superior to Finale’s.

Please don’t change it, team.

a “standard” score has the same width for every music frame. I didn’t say “fixed number of bars”.
Daniel referenced musical frames of different widths as one of the reasons for Dorico’s “circular logic”.

also, how is one bar at the end more difficult to fix than Dorico’s layout “overcapacity” accidents?

How is it easier? Either way you’ll have to touch the layout. But in this case, you’ll likely have to change the casting off for several systems.

I admit I was guessing you meant about fixed number of bars per system which makes casting off trivial.

The fact that the music frames are the same width does not mean the space available for the music is the same width.

The width of instrument labels depends on which staves are shown, which depends on which instruments are playing in a particular system. Key signature changes also affect the width available for the music.

maybe, the difference is a solitary bar at the end is usually inelegant and sloppy but not incorrect.
Overlapping systems are always a glitch which needs to be corrected. Dorico does allow very short, underpopulated systems at the end, so you still need to rebalance those anyway.

Look, I love Dorico and its approach to notation, I just believe it shouldn’t produce layouts which look like a computer error.