I stopped manually changing frame sizes due to Dorico attaching the engraving formatting changes to the page number itself, rather than the contents of the page.
I went to resizing the system gaps in the vertical engraving option, however due to the the attached screenshot I am dreading the fact that system gap resizing might also be attached to a page, and any shifting pages previous also affect this!!
What would be ideal is a way for the inter-system gap above to adjust itself manually to fit in all the system text.
Unfortunately, this won’t work when the text is above the first system on a page; in that case, the text will just extend up above the music frame. You could create a separate page template with a lower music frame, and then apply a page template change to this page.
Thanks for this - it’s a cool idea, and I’ve tried implementing it but it still falls to the same problem that dorico seems to attach these changes to a Page Number, as opposed to the material in the frame (added to page 78 and 79 of the score, first SS is just after implementing, second SS is after adding two pages before)
Maybe this makes sense as you only change the general spacing of the system, as opposed to the spacing above a system of a specific bar and its contents, but this all seems to be hugely problematic for scores where I want to input large amounts of cue text.
Do we know why Dorico does not adjust the first system of the page when there is text above it?
I’m not sure, but I think that technically Dorico is performing collision avoidance with other objects in the music frame (i.e., the system above the one with the text). When the text is above the first system, there’s nothing above that to avoid a collision with.
Yes, page template changes are applied to a page, not to page content – but they’re also relatively easy to remove and then apply to a different page as needed. Yes, this can be a hassle when the changes cascade through dozens of pages in a score.
Dorico spaces staves/systems so that the staff lines are at consistent heights across pages, regardless of content above/below.
We know that some users would prefer that Dorico nudges staves up/down from the bottom/top of pages, according to protruding content. However, this isn’t currently possible.
In general, the best way to work with spacing in Dorico is to avoid local page overrides as much as possible, and instead use things like page template changes, flow heading templates, etc to get the music as close as possible to the desired end position without too much manual intervention.
Some key principles in this video might be relevant, even if the context is a bit different:
Thank you for this response - but even a page template change is attached to the page number as opposed to the material on the page, so if a page of material is added prior to the flow containing this change, the music shifts across the template change. I’ve had a skim of the video but it uses very small flows with just 1-2 bars, mutations of pages within a flow seems to be a different problem.
Sometimes I want to attach a large amount of text above a system, and there seems no solid way to do this for that system to also be the first on a page.
I was reading in forums back pre-2020 that this would be really frustrating for Musical Theatre; an example was brought up that if you have already formatted a score and it’s in previews, doing any change that adds or removes pages of material would shift everything. Even if the layout is locked, the manual placement of systems or resizing of frames will mess everything up if music is shifted forwards/backwards between.
This only seems to be a problem with large amounts of text - certainly there are ways to adjust such that the space that text takes up is wider and shorter. Seems an unfortunate limitation however.
