I have been doing three projects in parallel to assess the Finale>Dorico transition:
- Converting a score with complexities (cadenza, shifting instrument, …)
- Converting a score with no complexities
- Entering a score from scratch
#2 is farthest along, to the point of formatting the systems. I ended up manually placing all the system breaks, which seems to be contrary to the Dorico way of doing things.
How are system breaks nomally handled in a score? Is there an option for a target number of measures per system? (I see one for a fixed number but that would be even worse for me.)
There isn’t a target number, no, but note that the fixed casting off isn’t rigid - you can still add your own system breaks and frame breaks and it’ll recalculate around you.
It really depends on the type of material you’re working with, and for that matter the genre you’re working within.
For instance, classical concert pieces quite often end up being quite tightly spaced, particularly in the parts, whereas music for film sessions is often quite widely spaced with four bars to a system the norm even for people playing whole notes.
If you can see that what Dorico’s doing automatically is just a little too wide or a little too tight in general, it’s well worth playing with the Note Spacing section of Layout Options. Just altering the top value (the space for a quarter note) will affect all note values accordingly, so reducing it from 4 spaces to even 3 7/8 spaces may squeeze things closer together sufficiently to e.g. get that one orphaned system onto the previous page.
Layout Options are global to the layout, but Note Spacing can also be overridden locally from Engrave > Note Spacing Change. Changes made here will take effect until the next Note Spacing Change or the end of the Flow, whichever comes sooner.
There are many ways of achieving this!
This is my approach.
The first step is to remove all system breaks that I might have created while writing or entering the piece.
The second step for me is to identify points where a system break or frame-break are definitely needed. Examples of this are ensuring workable page turns for string players, and some divisi changes where the music is much more readable if the divisi change starts on a new system. I enter system and frame breaks at these points. If things look hopeless at this point, I might re-think my decisions!
The next step is to decide whether I need to make the music take up less room (rarely, more). This is very important for players for whom page turns can difficult, such as strings. I try to make the music fit onto a 2-page spread where it’s workable.
To achieve this, I avoid using system breaks, but instead I use note-spacing changes, which can be done in Engrave mode (the default note spacing rules for a layout can also be set up in layout options, but personally, I rarely change the defaults).
Note-spacing changes allow to change a number of parameters that affect note spacing, and you can insert as many as you like in different parts of the flow. The benefits of doing things this way is that you are still allowing the spacing algorithms to work as much as possible. Manual system breaks reduce what the algorithm can do, and it generally gives better results than my attempts to do it manually.
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