opposite concertina drag

Dorico
#1

Sorry if this has been discussed…I thought I saw a post about it earlier while looking for something else, but now I can’t find that thread. It might have been an old one anyway.

Is there any way of doing an opposite concertina drag, or are there any plans to add this in the future? Instead of proportionally compressing the staves in the direction of the drag, you’d be proportionally expanding the staves on the other side. This would be just as useful as the regular concertina drag I think. Overall loving Engrave mode so far.

#2

There’s no way to do this at present, and we don’t have any current plans for it, but I would not rule out the possibility altogether for the future.

#3

I’ll add my vote for this. I’ve wished this was possible quite a few times already.

#4

Me too!

The quite common situation is when Dorico decides to separate two staves by too much (to my liking), creating an “ugly gap” between say staves 3 and 4 of 10 stave page. I want to drag up staves 4-10 to “close the gap” while maintaining even spacing between staves 4-10. Alternatively, I could drag down stave 1-3. Neither is possible with the current concertina drag. Of course, I’d be interested if there’s another elegant solution that I hand’t thought of!

#5

This has become my #1 wish for Dorico. In every project I’ve done I’ve had to manually enter the values to get the staff spacing I want. An opposite concertina drag would save me from doing this, and there would never be a project when I wouldn’t use it.

#6

If you’re finding that staves are being spaced unevenly, you might want to look at the tips on this page about changing vertical spacing values, particularly about vertical justification. Or, if it’s a text object/system text object causing extra spacing to be allocated, you could disable collision avoidance for the offending object.

And don’t forget you can always control vertical spacing by adjusting the size of the music frame - I find this particularly useful when the last page in a part isn’t quite full, I just drag the bottom of the music frame up until the justification is to my liking.

#7

Thanks Lillie. good tips. In some ways, the scenario I described originally prompts me to desire a “maximum staff gap”, rather than a minimum one, but I realise that is in conflict with the concept of collission avoidance.

What a bizarre setting, “collision avoidance”: by default it’s switched off, but if you switch it on it activates a tick-box, which by default is empty, but if you tick the tick-box, it gets you back where you started from…

#8

The Switch tells you whether you’ve overridden the global setting for that kind of item (Engraving Options > Text > Collision Avoidance, for example). The Tickbox is a simple on/off.
Once you’ve flicked the switch, that property for that item is now permanently overridden, meaning that if you change the global option that one item will remain however the individual tickbox is set.

#9

Thanks for the tips. I think the issue I have is that when I make adjustments in layout options it effects the entire score. I’ll have my general settings the way I want but for a some pages I just need to increase the spacing proportionally for all staves on the page. Decreasing the spacing proportionally is easy with the concertina drag, but without the opposite function it’s a very tedious task.

#10

+1 for “opposite” concertina drag. I realize it’s a UI challenge, as there would be four possible concertina drags (compressing-up, compressing-down, expanding-up, expanding-down), but I think it’s a solvable problem.

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