Loving the heck out of Dorico. In general I like the approach that it builds as much on overall settings as possible. That said, I would like to suggest two features, and they’d interact with each other:
Ability to deactivate vertical justification on a per page basis.
Ability to specify a uniform spacing for staffs and systems where vertical justification is overriden.
As for the first request: there may be times where one “percentage full” amount may make one page look great and another look awkward.
As for the second request: There are many, many times where I look at a page and just think , “give me the opportunity to space staves evenly on just this page.” Then if I have to make individual vertical adjustments, I’m starting from a more elegant place. As things stand now, you can adjust staff spacing individually, but there’s no way to ask Dorico just to clean up this page. Since you CAN adjust staves individually, why not allow us to look at a page, see a pair of staves that look good, and allow us to assign that spacing to all staves on the page?
My workaround for this is to use the “copy page layout” function, but it’s just a workaround.
Hi Ben—well, I did figure out some things, in particular, how to make frame height and vertical justification work together in parts to get the spacing I want. But see the attached. Two points about this screenshot:
Here’s page 2 of a score. Because of the title at the top, there’s less room vertically than on subsequent pages. I’d like to shrink the staff-to-staff distance on this page only—is there a way to do that without having to move each staff individually?
In vertical spacing mode, if I grab all the staff handles of a system and option-drag up, I can tighten the spacing between the staves. But the inverse is not true—even with option-drag, only the bottom staff moves downward. Am I missing something?
If you reduce the “Ideal Gaps” between the staves in each system, then Dorico will stretch out this page (to the “shorter” page area), and then stretch out all the other pages (to the “full” page area).
Generally, using too large a value for Ideal Gaps messes things up.
If you want to PM me the dorico file, then I can layout it out as I would do it, and show you the result. A simple score of four staves should not need any manual adjustments, really.
Interesting! I hadn’t realized that ideal staff-to-staff gaps took the top and bottom system positioning into consideration. Very helpful, thanks. (No need to send you the file since I understand now.)
That said, regarding the second point I made, regarding the fact that you shrink the staff gaps within a system proportionally by option-dragging up, but can’t expand them by option-dragging down—am I missing something?
It’s not so much that, but the Ideal Gap settings are applied first; then any adjustment for collision avoidance, then the vertical justification stretches them to fill the page area.
No: you’re not missing anything about the concertina dragging. However, for something like this, you shouldn’t need to make anything more than small, fine-tuning adjustments in Staff Spacing, rather than large wholesale changes.
The “Ideal Gaps” in Layout Options are really another type of “minimum gap”: they set the gaps between staves in various contexts that Dorico will use as an absolute minimum.
If staves need to be further apart than those values in order to accommodate high/low notes that extend outside staff lines, or dynamics, or lyrics, or… then that space gets added on top of Ideal Gaps.
Similarly, on vertically justified pages, any extra space available on the page will get allocated amongst staves on that page on top of the Ideal Gaps, the extra space for protruding items, and the extra padding for inter-staff/inter-system collisions.
Much as I respect that Dorico has its own approach to layout, and I’ve seen many advantages to it, the fact that you can concertina drag staves proportionately in one direction (up) but not the other… can we agree that makes no sense? Might Dorico consider making that ability symmetrical?
If I may make a suggestion: There is clearly a philosophy that the user should do as much as possible to rectify page-specific concerns by adjusting general settings. And there’s a lot of power in that. I would simply suggest shifting the balance SLIGHTLY toward giving us more powerful tools on individual pages. In the case of the piece whose screenshot I posted, I’m happy with the whole layout except for that page. This naturally makes me think, “What happens to the rest of all my careful work if I adjust the Ideal Gaps setting?” Needless to say the particular issue with my example page was no big deal to fix. Just saying, a little more love for empowering “local fixes” would go a long way IMHO.
Might Dorico consider making that ability symmetrical?