Note Spacing Problem on one system

Dorico
1

I have attached a hymn that I am working on. I “kind of” got the spacing like I want it but the third system is VERY buggy. I had to do a lot of adjustments and the percentage is not very large. Is there something I have in this system that is causing this spacing issue?

I have had this problem before and I would like to find out what I am doing that is causing this.

The Half Was Never Told.dorico (2.3 MB)

Thanks!

Bryce

2

All of your systems are overfull, which means you are likely to get undesirable results.

I did Engrave > Note Spacing > Reset Layout to remove all manual note spacing changes, and then I went to Layout Options > Note Spacing and set the default space for quarter notes to 3 1/2 spaces instead of 4. That already got me results that I think look better, even though the systems are still overfull. You might also try changing making your Lyrics paragraph style a half point smaller.

I don’t have any direct experience with hymnals, but I know several other forum regulars do; perhaps they’ll have better suggestions.

3

I changed to 3.5 and that helped a lot. Thank you. When systems are overpopulated, does Dorico have problems with its auto spacing?

When I have a system like the third one in this example, I can manually adjust the notes but it will sometimes move only a very small amount on single arrow tap or it may jump nearly a measure.

4

Sure. You’ve given Dorico a set of parameters – space size, page size, margin size, note spacing, lyrics, etc. – and if a system is marked as more than 100% full, that’s Dorico’s way of saying that it can’t fulfill all of your requirements at once.

Personally, I find that the occasional system that’s 103% or 105% full is usually okay, but the more overfull a system is, the less good it will look. In those cases, it’s good to adjust one or more parameters so that Dorico can fit everything in.

5

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6

Okay so I took a crack at some things here and I think this is a somewhat acceptable outcome, although if you hate some of the changes feel free to change or revert back the things that I fiddled with. (Also I didn’t have nor could I download your ornaments font, so I substituted it for Bodoni Ornaments, but I don’t think that changes much)
The Half Was Never Told.dorico (2.3 MB)

In order, here’s what I changed:

  1. I removed all of the manual note and staff spacing adjustments
  2. Changed a bunch of values in Layout Options > Note Spacing: I set the quarter note value to 3 spaces from 4, removed the minimum gap between short notes entirely, and changed the spacing ratio to my preferred 1:1.5. In the project the ratio was pretty close to 1:1 (all note durations receiving equal physical space), and the reason I changed it to a larger ratio was to prevent the longer durations like half notes, dotted halves, dotted quarters, etc. from getting too squished and making the eighth and sixteenth notes shorter by default.
  3. Not related to this particular issue, but I adjusted the vertical spacing between systems and the system justification values a bit in Layout Options > Vertical Spacing at this time too.
  4. I made the space size slightly smaller from 1.38mm to 1.32 mm, thus making the staff size about 5.3mm tall instead of 5.5mm.
  5. I went to Engraving Options > Spacing Gaps and changed the ideal gap after barline to 1.25 spaces and the minimum gap after barline to 0.5 spaces. Here I was just trying to buy as much free space as I could before I started tackling the lyric spacing.
  6. I edited the lyrics Paragraph Style and changed it from an absolute size of 9 pts to a staff-relative size of 11.5 points, which when shrunk to 5.3mm makes the text a size of about 8.7 pts. I also edited the stretch to be 98%, which makes the width of the letters ever so slightly condensed, but without them looking too squished.
  7. Engraving Options > Lyrics: this is probably where I did the most important fiddling. I changed the minimum gap between a syllable and a hyphen from 2 spaces to 1.5 spaces, the minimum space to allow for hyphen from 1 space to 0.25 spaces, and I changed the minimum space between lyrics to be 3/4 of a space from 1 space. Changing the first two values allows for hyphens to take up less physical space, while that final value allows for individual words to be placed closer together and will distort the “natural” spacing of each phrase less.

Hopefully this all helps! Unfortunately, if you want the text or staff to be larger than where I was able to set them you’ll have to use different margin or page dimensions as I think I was able to get everything set as well as I could given the margin dimensions and the 6" x 9" page size.