Moving a measure to previous system

Dorico
1

Hi lovely Dorico users,

I’m trying to figure out how to adjust measures per system in engrave mode. It seems really easy to bump a measure to the next system by adding a system break, or to create a new system out of a selection (something which used to be an absolute pain in Finale!), but I can’t for the life of me figure out how to move a measure up to the previous system. I don’t want to fix a particular number of measures per system for the whole layout, but I would like to be able to adjust it on a case-by-case basis.

I’m fairly new to using Dorico (and loving it so far!), so I apologize if this is an incredibly basic question. It looks like a similar question was asked at How to move measures to previous systems in Dorico - Dorico - Steinberg Forums, but as a newbie I don’t quite understand the proposed solutions.

Thanks so much,
schmidzy

2

Welcome to the forum, schmidzy. You’re quite right that Dorico doesn’t currently have a direct equivalent of the neat feature in Finale for moving bars between systems, though this is definitely something we’d like to add in future.

For the time being, you need instead to think about the bars you want to see on a system together. Select the note or rest at the start of the bar that you want to come at the start of the system (or the barline at the end of the previous system if you prefer) and the last note or rest in the bar that you want to end the system (or the barline at the end of that bar if you prefer) and click the Make Into System button; you can of course assign a key command to this in the Key Commands page of Preferences if need be.

However, I would hope that you will need this kind of functionality less often in Dorico than you did in Finale. If you want more bars on a system, the first thing to try is to reduce the default note spacing value on the Note Spacing page of Layout Options. You can also change this at a particular spot in the music via a Note Spacing Change.

3

Thanks, Daniel! That’s so intuitive, I’m not sure why I didn’t think of it before. Appreciate the help!