Hello community,
is there a place where i can define a minimum bar width.
I often wish, that e.g. bars with only 2 quarter notes would not be condensed in width under a certain value so that they, when you need to have a lot of music in a stave, don’t look too mashed inside a stave with bars that contain e.g. 8x1/16ths.
In Finale there is a minimum bar width… is there something similar in Dorico?
Have a look on the last bar…
No, there’s no way to specify a minimum bar width. I’d also argue that what Dorico is doing in that system is pretty good! Arguably your lyric spacing is a bit loose, and if you tightened that a bit you might find that the last bar is spaced reasonably, but I seem to remember you posting in another thread that your ideal gap for a quarter note is set to something like 3 1/2 spaces, and that looks pretty much like your ideal specified width to me.
Hello Daniel,
mmmh i also find the (all of my) lyrics to be too loosly spaced but i can’t find the right parameters or places in the engraving options that, if we stay with the example above, would make the syllables come together and the overall differences of bar widhths less drastic.
For my eyes, the last bar is looking to condensed and the first bar to wide; in total i want a “softer transition” of the overall proportions.
For sure everything in Dorico is looking nice and clean and i am just polishing the last 3%, but thats my job as an professional engraver…
Edit – Well, I just read your other thread and every good suggestion I would have is there already!
I would suggest reducing the ‘Minimum gap between adjacent lyrics’ to e.g. 3/4 space or possibly even smaller. You might also consider a note spacing change on the first bar of the system to reduce the value for a quarter note to e.g. 3 or 2 3/4 spaces, then increase the value for the final bar to e.g. 4 spaces. Or you can simply drag a bunch of handles earlier in the system using the note spacing tools in Engrave mode to close up those columns a bit, and then widen the ones at the end of the system manually.
Thank you Daniel,
that was exactly what i was looking for for the moment.
Although i would find it more elegant to just pick or Alt-Arrow the barline and drag it where i want, with the whole music adjusting accordingly.
For those of you interested, these are the results of just modifying some numbers as Daniel suggested:
Before:
After:
I would really like to see a setting for defining a minimum bar width. No doubt that for most cases Doricos settings work well but here are my scenarios that I often run in to:
In live concerts of film music I have a fixed number of bars per page that generally work for the whole show. Now once in a while there is only 3-4 bars long or end with a page of 2 bars. Instead of getting this:
Can I do this myself and do I know how? Yes, I’m not asking about that. I’m suggesting ways Dorico as a professional notation application can be improved. I know in the whole user base there are few that work with these scenarios but for time sensitive projects that usually have many bars and pages this is something I would greatly appreciate being automated.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. At the moment, just to confirm the options available to you although I’m sure you know them -
Thank you, Lillie. As I said there really is no option for this.
From the bottom of your list:
If you set the note spacing to something quite big like 6 for a quarter note, and a custom spacing ratio of 2, you can get something like linear spacing (down to 16th notes), if that’s what you want.
