Parts do only show in galley view

I must be doing something wrong, but I’m not able to see the parts of my project in page view. When I switch from score to one of the parts, the main section of the dorico window becomes all white except exactly the upper left quadrant of the window and no content at all is shown.

When I switch to galley view, however, I can see the part.

I did this:

  • created a project with only piano and entered music into it
  • added a whole orchestra by adding individual sections
  • added additional instruments to some wind players
  • entered music in galley view into the full score layout

Page view only shows content in full score and the piano part, all other parts do not work. Checkboxes in the layout column and the flow (there is only one) are set. When I am in engrave mode and expand the “pages” triangle at the right side there are no pages shown. I can add empty pages, but I still do not see any of my music.

I was somehow able to create another custom layout with all orchestra parts except the piano. This layout actually works. I tried to create another custom layout with only one player, which did not work. I do not recall having done anything different when creating the first layout.

When I create a new project with the orchestra template it works as I would expect.

It sounds as if you’ve ended up with layouts with no players and/or flows assigned to them. In Setup mode, select the layouts in the Layouts panel and examine carefully what is showing as checked in the Flows and Players panels.

As I wrote: The flow-checkbox and the respective Player checkbox for each part layout is active. The Part layouts are the ones that were created by the program when the players were created.

Interestingly, I found out, when I add either the piano or the trumpet 1 part to any part or custom layout, the page will appear. I cannot see any difference between these two players and any of the others. If I create a new full score layout and uncheck all but one player this works, even if it is neither piano nor trumpet 1.

Here’s a link to the file so maybe someone can have a look into it.

Here’s an update to my problem:

I created a new project using the “Modern Orchestra” template and added/deleted some players/instruments accordingly. Here the part layout displayed as expected (showing one single bar with a rest.

I then copied/pasted the content of the original file. It did not work selecting the whole project, but when I copied sectionwise I finaly got it done. But now this new project shows exactly the same behaviour as the original one: Only the part layouts of trumpet 1 and the piano will display.

So there must be somthing in the music that corrupts something. Please have a look into it.

Ok, I found the culprit: the length of the tempo text is causing the issue. It occurs when the number of characters exceeds 63.

However, When I move it slightly to the right so that is is attached to the second eighth instead of the downbeat all parts are being displayed properly.
I even can move it back graphically in engrave mode and the parts still work.

Obviously this does not affect the trumpet and the piano part because they are the only ones that do not begin with an empty bar. When I enter a rest into the first bar in any part it also will display.

I am quite positive that this is not as it is intended to be, is it?

No, this definitely doesn’t seem right to me. I have asked one of the developers to take a look at this and I will come back to you when I can.

The problem is caused by the long tempo mark over the first bar making the first bar too wide for the chosen page width and staff size. Dorico can’t fit even the first bar onto the first system, so it gives up casting off the music and nothing ends up being drawn.

What you should do is either shorten the initial tempo instruction (perhaps specify the appropriate tempo merely as a metronome mark, which you can hide if need be, and replace the current long text with a bit of system text – Shift+Alt+X – that can include a line break), or increase the page size for parts, or reduce the staff size for parts.

Hi Daniel, thanks for looking into it.

If this were completely true it would not explain why the page is properly being displayed for the parts that have music in the first bar (i.e. tpt 1 + piano), or why it works when the long tempo marking is attached to a rhythmic position later than the downbeat of bar 1.

I can live with it for the time being, as it seems clear to me that it is not an issue of a file corruption that might cause more headaches later on. But I definitely would consider it a bug that should be addressed some time.

A desired behaviour would be that an overly-long tempo marking should possibly exceed bar, system and even page margins, so that in the worst case the rightmost portion would eventually be cut off by the printer driver, leaving it in the responsibility of the user to alter staff margins or the scaling of the text.

It does explain it, in fact, because the situation is different when you have a multi-bar rest and when you don’t. When there’s music in the first bar, you don’t have a multi-bar rest.

Ok, but actually there is not really a multibar rest, as the second bar is in a different meter. Does Dorico internally treat a series of consecutive empty bars as one entity, no matter if a rest symbol is actually being displayed?

It reminds me of Product A where certain objects like instrument changes caused multibar rests to split unnecessarily.

When multi-bar rests are shown, even single empty bars are treated as multi-bar rests, and thus the approach taken to trying to prevent things like tempo marks being wider than the multi-bar rest is the same, regardless of how many bars are consolidated into the multi-bar rest (since by definition there is something else at the start of the next “bar” that could collide with the tempo mark).