Thanks for letting me in!
I am considering moving from Finale v26 to Dorico v4.
A simple question - in Finale I can reduce the size of the music on a page by specifying a percentage so that all objects on a page are reduced by say 80%. This a quick way of increasing the number of systems displayed on a page. How do I do that in Dorico please?
Welcome! Fellow ex-Finale user here.
Layout Options—Page Setup—Space Size.
and additional to Dan’s answer, you can do this even on a per page (or even per system) level.
As Dan says, changing the Space Size will scale the music, and all the elements that designed to scale with it. But unlike Finale, items in Text Frames, such as Title, Headers, Page numbers, can’t be globally scaled by a percentage value. (Though of course you can just change the point size of the Paragraph Style.)
Like in Finale, objects that attach to the staff can have a relative point size, or an absolute one.
You can also change the staff space size at any System Break.
I’d caution you that Dorico is very different, so don’t expect things to work in the same way. However, there’s lots of excellent documentation, videos – and help here!
Here’s an article about moving from Finale to Dorico – though it’s quite old and much has improved since then.
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You might enjoy flicking through the section in our First Steps guide for new Dorico users about “making music look nice on two pages”. Using only top-level settings, music that was originally on four pages is made to fit neatly and well-behaved-ly onto two.
Start on this page, and follow the “next page” links in the bottom right corner.
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Thanks everybody for your suggestions. This is certainly a completely new way of working.
I’ll experiment and see how I get on. Brilliant responses to my question. I have no doubt there will be more. Thanks in advance for your patience!!!
To expand a bit on what Benwiggy said-- it’s very important in switching to Dorico from ANY other software, Finale, Sibelius, whatever, that you forget everything you know or thought you knew about music notation software and learn Dorico from scratch, as though you had never used such a program before. Also watch a lot of the videos, especially the early ones from when Dorico first launched. If you approach it in that way you will learn it easily and quickly. But if you try to make it work like another program, you will experience nothing but frustration.
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