I was wondering if anyone has any tips for pagination of large-scale works in Dorico. The choices it makes by default frequently don’t make a lot of sense. Multiple systems on one page of a score where the systems are colliding horribly, page turns in patently terrible locations in parts, that sort of thing. I understand the logic behind this is pretty cumbersome to deal with programmatically, but it’s often enough to cause me to procrastinate on finishing up a product because of the amount of tinkering I need to do in order to make the musicians not curse my or my company’s name when they encounter a tempo marking cut off by the right margin of a page and a page turn three measures before a multirest.
That sounds like your manual interventions have constrained Dorico.
Seriously, leaving Dorico to do it’s own thing (according to the options you choose) will yield pretty good results. [The amount of ‘tinkering’ I have to do with Dorico is far less than any other notation program I have used]
If you want help, upload a file and someone will be able to offer guidance.
Dorico does not attempt to determine page turns.
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I don’t really know what you mean by this. It’s like this out of the box and has been for as long as I’ve been doing this. The tinkering I mentioned is to make this stop, not what puts it in that state. It doesn’t seem to have this problem on projects that only have a few staves, like a chamber piece, but as soon as you put in a full orchestra with condensing and empty staves hidden, systems start colliding every so often.
Have you watched the Discover Dorico videos on Page Layout?
If you want to upload the project, then we can make some recommendations.
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I haven’t, because I’ve been using Dorico since version 1. I’ll give the video a look anyway; there’s always a chance there’s something I’ve missed over the years.
I’m not really at liberty to upload this particular project (and I’ve already fixed this one anyway) since I don’t know of a way to reproduce this without the score being of a certain size and length, and then I’m essentially posting a lot of copyrighted material in public.
(You could always use the Write > Transform tools to change the pitches.)
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Once Dorico crosses the 100% threshold for page fullness, things can get messy.
There are a range of things you can do. You may already know these, of course.
The simplest is to insert frame breaks to take a system off the page. For serious messes that is where I start. First though, I check to see if the problem is caused by a downstream break with the ‘wait for next’ property set. It can be worth removing all breaks from a problematic flow and starting afresh.
Other tools in your repertoire that can affect the pagination are the vertical spacing settings in layout options and note spacing changes in engrave mode. You can even adjust staff sizes at breaks if you need to, or tweak the margins.
In terms of placing page turns, there are currently no tools to help with that (though the development team are considering something that will help).
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