I am engraving an exercises packet for a school. I am using separate flows for each exercise (about 8-10 bars each). I have the page setup as I want. Overall, the pages looks great! One issue, is that the layouts for the individual instruments are 5 pages long (very lengthy flow heading with “things to think about” in the flow heading).
I am trying to move the individual instruments to 2 pages maximum. I start with note spacing. I change the ‘default space for crotchet/quarter note’ to 2 3/4. And I also change the ‘minimum space for short notes’ to 3/4. ‘Only justify final system when more than:’ is set to 70%.
I got an odd thing happening, where one staff was 39.5% full and would not collapse inward as the setting should warrant.
It is ONLY happening on flow 1 (out of 10). Not forced casting off, no system breaks, etc. Puzzling, but not an emergency.
Regardless, I realize that note spacing alone will not fix this issue of being required to cram this music into 2 pages. I mess with music frame margins (top and bottom in page layout options) and flow heading top and bottom margin. Success being made, still not enough.
I change the staff size. The requirement from the school was to get a 2 page part layout at almost any cost. But now I run into the opposite situation. The first line of multiple exercises is undefiled, while the second line is closer to being fully filled.
I’m confused why the spacing is not somewhat balancing out? I know I can force measures together. Generally speaking my work flow os to start with Dorico’s default and work from there.
Anyone else experience this before? Is this because I changed the note spacing? Any suggestions?
There’s definitely some odd behavior here. Flow 4 also seems to want to be justified, even when it’s under the threshold. I don’t see the cause yet, though.
That explains SO much. Thank you for the reference! I tried searching for this, but since it didn’t exactly affect only the final system, I didn’t search for such. I searched for “Issues with left to right justification.”
Not sure if it still answers the issue with the first line of the flow not filling up.
if you add a Note Spacing Change at the beginning, you can either get it in two systems (reducing the note spacing to 2 3/8), or get it in three systems (the last one shortened), nicely distributed, by setting 3.
Ohhhh, sorry, I don’t understand. I think I changed staff size in that example. But I did change it to size 6 eventually, and the problem existed there.
Yes, that’s interesting. At rastral 6, the first systems in flows 1, 2, and 10 are all greatly underfilled. This does not appear to be related to flows ending with a bar rest.
