Have I missed a âdo not overfillâ pages checkbox. ?
What is the fix here so that it always âworks out of the boxâ. To be consistent with the Dorico philosophy I should not have to make any adjustments in engrave mode.
As I once mentioned before itâs even more frustrating because Dorico always does fill view correctly. So to paginate: All it has to do, having worked out the systems in fill view (for the correct page width), is to simply to pour systems like you pour porridge into bowls at breakfast time in simple succession; starting with the first page and moving to the last page. It really is that simple. No oneâs bowl needs to be overfilled with consequent mess on the table cloth.
Sure the last bowl may be a little underfilled but thatâs life. (*In any event any experienced Dorico user will then start adjusting note sizes and note spacings so that the last bowl is fairly filled - this is actually something Dorico could do itself , its only a successive approximation problem *).
Fill View does not accurately reflect the layout on the page.
I made only two changes and everything fitsâŚ
Layout options>Page setup>Rastral Size to size5 (6.0mm) - This is perfectly OK for the Score. You only really need 7.0mm for orchestral parts (and even 6.5mm is OK for quartet parts)
Layout options>Stave and systems> Staff labels to None (apart from the first system) - You canât be confused about what instrument is on which stave in a quartet, and this setting gives you more space to play with on each system.
The factory default Staff Size is size 3, which Iâd suggest is too large for ensemble music on an A4 page. (Perhaps OK on a larger sheet.)
Itâs OK for keyboard works, lead sheets or even Piano-vocal; but for ensemble stuff, a smaller size is more suitable.
If youâre used to Finale, it would scale the staff size to fit the page, based on your ensemble, in the Setup Wizard. (In my experience, I would always have to âcorrectâ it afterwards anywayâŚ)
In any case, itâs not rocket salad to see that your music needs to be smaller on the page, if you want to fit 3 systems to a page. Your alternative is to fix 2 systems per page in Casting Off, but that seems excessive.
Perhaps you could make it fit, with much smaller distances between objects, and smaller margins at the top and bottom; but a slightly reduction in the size would be more legible.
Maybe Dorico ought to offer an automatic âsize the music to the pageâ function; though this might lead to the circular problem of trying to fit music to the page while changing what can fit on the pageâŚ
The truth is that Dorico sometimes makes incorrect guesses when it determines how much music to place on a page. Iâm more used to seeing this in cases where staves have lots of protruding notes or multiple staff attached objects, which is not the case here.
Hereâs an old but still valid post explaining why this sometimes happens.
Thank you, as always, for your timely and useful replies. And of course my problem is fixed.
However, it still feels wrong that Dorico should ever overfill a page given it has the option of pushing some last system(s) onto the next page.. And if that next page in turn overflowed then whole process could ripple down onto the next page etc, until the enire document is done. QED
Even when follow all the wise advice Iâve been given (e.g. reducing font size); in this work page 3 overlaps because Dorico attempts to put four states on page three.
Secondly I see overlaps very often . Iâm told Dorico has an expectation as to how high a set of staves (a âsystemâ will be). But:
Often I have much free expressive text and that causes systems to be higher than expected and hence overlap.
Or in this case I have deliberately (and unnecessarily) added all bowings and made them visible . Iâm quite certain if I were to hide the bowings all would all work .
Hence if Dorico continues to follow its existing algorithm maybe it needs to be more 'inclusive 'when it comes to 'guessing 'how high the staves will be.
As footnote : when I worked as a software engineer (42 yrs ouch! ) it was always company policy to collect unpleasant examples that our awkward customers found of our software ânot working as expectedâ and add them to the relevant regression test suites. Now I am completely retired I donât know anything about software, and maybe not much about music .
)
: I have found a magic flag that fixes it. If I tell it that I want three staves per page then all is good. So no need to send me a fix.
retired I donât know anything about software, and maybe not much about music 
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