Hey, I’m new to composition and Dorico, but nevertheless, I am at the stage where I have to print my composition. However, it looks very messy and small.
How can I stretch things out and make them more readable once printed? (refer to the image below).
Can you print to larger paper? For example, in the U.S. legal paper (8.5" x 14") works in many printers.
I’m sure I would be able to, I’m just wondering if there are any other formating options to make it a little less cluttered?
When I activate condensing, it doesn’t seem to do anything. Also, how would I stop those systems from overlapping?
Thanks for the help!
Dorico does some estimates on how big a system will be, and because there are some elements in your systems that take quite some space (bar numbers that overlap with tempo changes, for example), those guesses turn out to be wrong.
You have to manually insert a page break. Go to Engrave Mode, select the first element of the second system and add a page break there.
If you don’t want to use larger paper, can’t you just reduce the staff size?
Go to Layout Options->Page Setup->Staff Size. Switch to a smaller Staff Size.
Dorico generally does a really good job at calculating comfortable spacing automatically, but there are times when either one too few or one too many systems end up on a page. In these situations, you do need to step in and make a judgement.
For instance, here you could push the 2nd system onto the next page, by inserting a frame break at the start of the 2nd system. As that would leave the 1st system not occupying much of the page, you should e.g. show some of its empty, hidden staves using manual staff visibility (making sure to reset their visibility later where needed).
To save everyone time, here’s a reply I added to someone else’s thread earlier today, with pointers to further information about spacing in Dorico that sound like they would help you too @Dgrady04 :
Thanks everyone for the help so far! I have a couple new problems however. How should I go about fixing these?
In Layout options, select the full score (in the right column), then Page setup and change spacing size to a higher rastral size (at least 2 higher!). In your oboe part, change the spacing size to some smaller rastral size (at least 3 smaller…)
This should get you more or less where you want.
@Dgrady04 Make sure your scores and parts are set to use the appropriate page size and staff size: that looks suspiciously like the parts have ended up set to use A3 paper by mistake, or a very small staff size. Conversely, the score looks like it’s still using an A4 (or equivalent) page size with larger staves than suits a full score of this scale.
Oh my goodness, thank you guys so much! that really helped out a bunch!
Hey everyone, I’m continuing this conversation since I have found a similar but slightly different problem. In a score I am working with, I changed the paper size and rastral size to fit all the parts on the first page. However, by the second page, everything is taking up barely more than half a page. How would I go about rescaling individual pages?
I discovered that changing the rastral size effects the score universally, and I couldn’t find an option for changing the size of individual staves. I also tried using staff spacing in Engrave Mode, but I can’t figure out how to expand all of the staves proportionally.
I saw something about concertina dragging but I don’t know if that’s what I’m looking for. (P.S. The handbook gives you the Windows command for that, but not the Mac - I am on Mac).
Any suggestions? Thanks for the help!
You could show all staves – as you are not able to view more than one system anyway, it does not really help to hide empty.
Or, you could change the vertical justification settings:
If you set the first value to something low and the other one to something high, your second page will fill top to bottom margin.
If you want some staves to be smaller throughout the flow (eg for the case of the soloist’s line in the piano accompaniment part) see here.
If you want ossia staves for a short bit of additional material, see here.
But for the purposes of fitting music onto the page, I wouldn’t set different staff sizes on a per-page basis: try to find a size that balances well across the score. (However, if you really do need to do that, here’s how.)
For some great advice on achieving good, consistent, and (crucially) easy-to-produce staff spacing, watch (or dip into) these two Discover Dorico sessions:
Thank you, these were all very helpful!
