Hello, all. I have three questions about this divisi violin part that I hope somebody can help me with:
Why won’t the “gli altri” staff hide itself until it is needed? In Layout Options for the violin part I have “Hide empty staves: All systems” selected. I tried manually hiding the staff, but then it hid the staff throughout the entire part (including where it has notes).
What’s wrong with the third system? Why is the first solo part being banished from the group?
What is the setting that controls the font (and size) of the solo and unison indications? I tried all sorts of settings and nothing seems to affect them.
(It’s getting late now, but I’ll check back for words of wisdom tomorrow. Thanks in advance!)
The gli altri staff will appear as soon as you create the divisi. You need to create an initial divisi with just the solo parts (you can delete the gli altri that is created by selecting it in the divisi dialog and deleting it there). Then you need to create a new divisi when the gli altri start playing.
I don’t know. At the moment it looks like you have signposts turned off so it’s not clear what’s happening. It could be down to your staff hiding options, so I’d try turning those off and removing any staff visibility changes.
The size of the labels is determined by the paragraph style ‘Player labels’. If you change that in library > paragraph styles, it will change all the divisi and unison labels.
Thank you Richard. I reworked the divisi placements and that solved question #1.
As for #2, I turned on signposts and the “offending system”, has none. There is a system break just before that system, though. And, if I remove that system break on the first system, then the problem goes away. The problem is that I need the system break on the first system. What seems to be happening on the third system is that the two parts are getting flipped (notice where the m# shows up and the shape of the bracket). I can remedy that by manually dragging the staves into the correct orientation. That works, but doesn’t explain why it happened.
As for #3, you’ll notice that my divisi labels are a little bigger now.
I’m attaching two screen grabs, the first one shows system 3 with staves being flipped, the second one shows what it looks like after I manually drag the staves into the proper orientation.
It might be that the flipping is caused by adjustments you’ve made to the vertical positions of the staves (indicated by the red highlighting). I would start by removing all the manual vertical adjustments and seeing what it looks like then.
Normally, adjusting the vertical staff positions in engrave mode is rarely necessary - most issues can be sorted using layout options. The benefit of that is that if you change the music, or write more, things will continue to look good.
I gave myself trouble with the manual spacing I need for the first system. Dorico dealt with all that by putting the 4th measure on the second system, but for easy readability (and to look better in general) I wanted to lock 4 measures onto the first system. I think that’s when Dorico started adjusting things in strange ways. It seems strange that the problem occurred on the third, instead of the second (or even first) system, though.
