This is Finale territory…!
The attached image is after entering a four bar line of lyrics. It’s not easy to select the notes to ‘make into system’.
I was hoping the days of these interim lyric clumps was gone with Dorico!
It would be better for the note spacing to kill the lyrics rather than the other way round.
You must have already locked that system in order for Dorico to produce a result like that. Perhaps consider not forcing the system format if you know you’re going to be entering music that will definitely produce a bad result with a forced format?
Yes. I always work on a system structure. This is generally crucial for speed - that bits and pieces of layout are being produced consecutively with input (i.e. with a 130 cue theatre show, I’m not going to consider lyric layout until I put the lyrics in). If the lyrics were collided rather than the music it would be easier to fix quickly. This one took deleting all following system breaks.
Another one attached.
If I remove the system breaks Dorico spaces this with three bars instead of four, but there is easily space for the lyrics to squash, rather than the lyrics dictating music squashes.
I’ve had a couple of situations like this in which Dorico allowed too much space to certain lyrics to the detriment of the rest of the bar. I’ll try to post an example when I get home and can run Dorico. Looking at your example, you might reduce the amount of ‘padding’ for hyphens in your settings.
To be fair, you can only get results like your Lyric clashes example in Finale if, for some reason, you’ve turned off Automatic Update Layout and haven’t thought to update manually.
To be fair #2: barring your second layout example which might be possible to accomplish by changing some settings, how is any software program supposed to be able to produce good layout if you force its hand in advance?
Hi Vaughan,
To be fair #1: I’m so used to Cmd-U after everything in Finale. It is usually only clumpy whilst entering though.
To be fair #2: I’m pretty good at judging what will fit - Dorico defies me in this at the moment. You are right, that some of this is settings. A much bigger point is that, where music or lyrics need to clash to fit, I’d rather Dorico collided the lyrics (or even squashed the music) rather than bits of it overlapping following bars.