I’d like to reduce the size of a piano part in my score but only on pages where it will help me save space. I’ve seen some posts about reducing all the staves on a page by creating a System Break. But I don’t see how to reduce just the piano part for just a page. Can anyone advise on how to do this?
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Select the system break at the start of your reduced page.
Engrave mode properties… change the space size
When you want to return, add a system break and change the property back.
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Janus,
Thanks for the reply. Can you clarify “Engrave mode properties… change the space size”. Where are “engrave mode properties”? I don’t see that anywhere. And will this allow me to reduce the size of just the piano staff and not the other staves?
Ok. I need to reduce just the piano part, just for a page. Is there a way to do this?
Not that I know of.
That’s too bad. This was really easy to do in Finale.
Is this helpful?
No. That doesn’t discuss stave size for only one page of a score.
You could perhaps have a second piano player with a smaller staff size and hide empty staves. (or rather manual staff visibility)
Jesper
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Interesting but wow that sounds really tedious. In finale you could just resize a staff on a per- system basis with a could click of the mouse. I am surprised this is so elusive in Dorico.
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Some things are tricky to do in Dorico on purpose, in order to make you stop to think if you should. Let’s call it the Dr. Malcolm doctrine. 
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The doctrine that dorico knows what I want better than I do?
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How many properly-published scores have you seen in which individual staves change size between systems?
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Snark aside, what I have done on occasion, specifically in piano parts as well, is locally reduce the notehead size on specific systems. With long runs of fast notes (and consequently long measures), reducing the notehead size on those to something like 97% can theoretically double your space-efficiency if it makes the difference between allowing 1 or 2 bars per system.
Could you maybe share some pictures of a situation where you would want to reduce the staff size locally? Perhaps we can find a more straightforward solution.
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Who said anything about publishing a score? Who said anything about trying to make my score look like hrnbouma’s concept of what a “properly"-published” score is?
I’m trying to find ways of moving 3 bars from a page of the score to another page so that all the players don’t have to turn back a page on a repeated section. I try to keep all repeated material on one page to avoid turning back during a performance. In Finale I had all sorts of tools to tinker with the size and spacing of things on a system-by-system basis so I could experiment with the best way to make things fit. With Dorico things are more global and Dorico wants to do all the thinking for me but it does a bad job of keeping repeated material on the same page so I have to go in and do a lot of system breaks, which is fine, but here in this instance the system breaks aren’t enough and so I’d like to try to experiment with other ways of getting these last three bars onto a different page without making the music illegible. One idea I’d like to try, something that was easy in Finale, is to just reduce the size of the piano part for that page. But that doesn’t seem to be doable in Dorico, as far as I can tell. Instead I’m just getting some sort of random criticism from some random guy who knows nothing about my project or what I am trying to do.
To get 3 measures added to the end of a page, I would normally decrease the note spacing from it’s default 4 to 3.5 in Layout Options throughout the score long before I would try to change the staff size of one instrument on one page or system.
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This score is 200 pages long. I’ve been going through and creating system breaks to make everything look as I want it. In the middle of the score I’ve gotten to one point where I’d like move some measure to another page and have encountered the problem referenced. If I start making global changes to note spacing now it will mess up all the other formatting I’ve done. I don’t want that.
Then make a note-space change at a convenient system or frame break, or just use a pair of system breaks with “wait for next system break” set in properties.
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