Why does a small change in the rastral size change spacing and cause staff collisions? Thanks!
6mm
5.5mm
5.5mm
If you go into the Staff Spacing mode in the left panel of Engrave mode, can you see any red handles at the left edges of staves?
Yes, on both systems. I used them for moving the systems. Is there a better way?
Almost definitely. Without seeing the project itself it’s somewhat difficult to know exactly where you’re going wrong.
Every time you add/remove/edit an object on the page (whether note/dynamic/playing technique/lyric etc.), Dorico makes complex decisions in order to avoid collisions. Every time you adjust the page size or staff size, Dorico makes similar decisions. For this reason it’s critical that you set decent global settings that get you most of the way to a good result, and only meddle with individual tweaks like staff spacing at the last possible moment.
In your case it’s likely that Library > Layout Options > Vertical Spacing is the area you need to look at.
Meanwhile, select and delete those red handles, or use Engrave > Staff Spacing > Reset Layout to put those staves back in their default positions.
Always! IN Finale, you’ll be used to manually moving things about, but in Dorico that’s the last resort, usually reserved for fine tuning.
Dorico will space out the staves and systems for you, according to the settings you give it, as Leo has explained.
Now might be a good monent to post that handy vertical spacing PDF of yours, Ben…
Thanks, this is helpful.
This is quite the paradigm shift from finale. I feel like I went from an experienced professional copyist to a beginner!
I’ll add: the “Ideal Gaps” are the gaps between things before any collision avoidance or Justification. As a result, gaps on the page are likely to be wider.
In other words, set them to the smallest values that you want.
Isn’t it also true that applying any kind of manual staff or system spacing stops Dorico from making those decisions (kindly thinking that the engraver wants to “take the wheel and drive”)?
No, not really, and this is the problem here: if you change the rastral size, for instance, Dorico’s almost definitely going to calculate new default positions for both the objects attached to the staves and to the staves themselves. Reducing the rastral size is quite likely to mean that Dorico can fit more systems on a page, so all of those staves are going to get new default positions.
The manual staff spacing manouevres are offsets relative to default positions. If the staff spacing changes, the manual spacing stuff will be retained, but will now be relative to the new default positions. That’s what results in the sort of mess that appears at the top of the thread.
2 Likes
Manual adjustments come after the results of Dorico’s positioning, including collision avoidance. Knowing that should help with understanding what Dorico is doing.
Agreed, thanks. I just (thought I) remembered hearing somewhere in one of the videos about page layout that once one starts manually dragging, then going forward in the layout Dorico “surrenders” its staff and system behaviors.
Any idea what I might be (mis-)remembering, or was it just a bad dream I had?
Perhaps you’re thinking of what Dorico does when it comes to page overrides? Once a page is overridden, changes to the page template will no longer be reflected automatically in those overridden pages (which makes sense when you think about it).