Hello, x-Finale guy and loving Dorico. I have imported 15 piano pieces XML from Finale into one Dorico document. I needed to do a lot of editing (line by line) to make everything look as I want it to on the page. With all of the editing done, the formatting looks unbalanced, I have some last score pages with one line on them etc. I’ve done some measure vertical widening here and there so it was easier to see what I was doing. Now the question(s) is: How do I proceed from here? I’d like the book to look uniform and balanced and hopefully have final pages of each piece with a full page of staves. I’d like to also have title pages for each piece. So with that, I thank all of you for the generous help you have given me these last months. I look forward to your wisdom and advice (and please remember I’m a newb to Dorico, so please try and be specific. Thanks!!
The easiest thing is just to use Note Spacing Changes at the start of each flow. Select something on the first beat in Engrave mode, and select “Note Spacing Change” in the Engrave menu.
You can then … change the Note Spacing default value for that Flow (or until the next Change!). This makes it easy to tighten everything up, knocking back a single rogue system on the last page; or slacken everything off, filling that final page.
No need for that!
I second what @benwiggy wrote. In Finale, it was common to push things around until they looked the way you wanted. In Dorico, it’s better to start by adjusting the various options, to let Dorico’s algorithms do the work. Manual adjustments should be the last step in your process.
O.K., thanks. But did I mess things up by widening the vertical space on some staves? I only did to have more room to edit.
Since I’ve already did some manual vertical widening of staves in some places, did I mess things up? Can I somehow go back to the default?
If you manually adjusted the vertical system or staff spacing, those handles will appear red when editing staff spacing in Engrave mode. You can reset the staff spacing for the whole layout, the selected frame, or individual staves. For the whole layout or selected frame, I would use the Jump bar (J) and then type Reset Staff Spacing. If you want to reset just one or individual staves/systems, select the red handle(s) and type delete to return them to their default position.
Awesome! Thank you, James