Hello all, been searching the forum and fiddling with options but can’t find a solution to my problem with a solo violin score: I had staff spacing perfectly adjusted (to my taste) in a version of my score in 1.0.30 but upon opening in 1.1 (or now 1.1.1) spacing has been compressed or stretched so that sometimes there is too much room and other times lots of items are overlapping. Of course I could manually shift every stave but is there something else I can do to automatically lay out the whole score again so that there’s no overlapping items and space is optimised on the page?
Every node that has been subjected to manual adjustment will be shown in red, when in Staff Spacing mode. You can just select those nodes (all of them, really) and hit Backspace to reset their values.
You could force Dorico to cast off everything again by (temporarily) changing the staff size in layout options.
If you adjusted the staff spacing manually before but don’t see any red nodes now, then something must have gone wrong.
I’d be interested to see the project prior to any fixes you decide to make, so I can see if there’s any obvious reason for the big change in how it looks? I expect it will be due to the changes made in 1.1, and the project was last saved in 1.0.30.
It is not the default behavior in Dorico to have items overlapping. This cannot happen unless you manually tweak the casting off (by inserting frame or system breaks, for instance). You should notice that, deleting all these breaks, Dorico will cast off your music accordingly to the very precise rules it has inside, and you can change some of those rules changing the layout options (cmd or ctrl shift L) — for instance the space between staves or systems. Since you don’t have red nodes (in Engrave mode, with staff spacing enabled) you won’t have to reset those.
I think the right workflow with Dorico (as with any document editor actually) is to input your music, and once it is done, you deal with the engraving part. And you start with choosing your paper size, the margins, then the staff size, then the minimal space between systems…
Once this is all done, if you find you still need to move things around, then you can use system breaks and frame breaks. And if it still is not exactly what you want, then you move staves with the right option enabled in Engrave mode. And you can also tweak the note spacing if needed.
As Daniel explained in an interview (I think it was for Clarineet, in december), the Dorico devs have been inspired by Adobe’s Lightroom, where the workflow is clearly explained in the design of the app : start to work on you pictures with the functions on the top of the list, and go down the list following your needs.
Michael, note that Marc and Daniel posted at roughly the same time. Marc wasn’t to know that changes were made in 1.1 that retroactively change things that were fine in 1.0.30.
Marc, you may want to rescind some or all of your message
Indeed, my answer and Daniel’s were posted in the same minute ^^
I might not have answered accurately to the problem Michael is facing, yet I do not think I made mistakes in my answer. It could help any new Dorico user to get familiar with a consistent workflow, don’t you think ?
Marc, I agree, but it doesn’t make apply to the problem seen here. The problem seen here is that someone’s made something look lovely in 1.0.30, and then they’ve opened it in 1.1.1 and it no longer looks lovely. It’s not down to workflow, which was quite possibly done in exactly the order you describe.
I think that’s correct. I also accept that during this stage of its development, things might look a bit different when opening a score made in an earlier version. I just wouldn’t mind a way of resetting the layout so there are no clashes, rather than doing everything by hand. Cheers, Michael
When I imported my chamber version of the Ligeti (into 1.1) and then edited all of the markings, I had great results in the score. The parts however, were another story. Much overlap and no red squares. This is likely due to the fact that that there is an inordinate amount of information in Ligeti -
practiccally in every bar - which makes engraving a nightmare from the get-go. Still, the unaltered cello part looks like this:
I tried new layouts from scratch, different size papers, etc … But Dorico seems to cry uncle with this one. It’s all fixable in engrave mode of course, but maybe the team would like to have a peak at that score too?
Yes, Claude, by all means send it over. We have found and fixed the problem that was causing Michael’s score to go bananas, and probably it will solve the problem with yours as well, but if you send it to me, then I can confirm that for certain.
Unfortunately the nature of the fix means that any changes you make to the staff spacing to correct the effects of the bug will mean that the systems will all end up in bad positions again once you have got the fix, and you’ll need to reset the staff spacing again in the new update when it arrives.
I sent the score to your email. No worries about resetting the spacing once the fix is available: I imagine that I will not be doing this piece again in a long time!
I have read through the ‘reset staff spacing’ topic but can’t find the solution to my problem:
I have a 24 page project with 10 flows for violin and piano. I am creating a version for Bb Clarinet, but when applying the ‘Clarinet and PIano’ layout (as a transposing layout) the extra key signatures and low ledger lines (I have transposed some of the clarinet part) force the layout into 3 systems per page not 4 as in the orignal version, and it runs 38 pages rather than the original 24. Expensive to print…
I can combine frames/staves ecc. to get 4 systems but the spacing between the staves and sytems is all over the place, and 'reset spacing for frames or systems does nothing, I have the same problem when I set the layout options to force 4 systems per page, they all end up on top of each other and I can’t reset the spacing. How is the ‘reset spacing’ thing supposed to work?
I can’t face manually moving every single stave in the project even if I can get it to layout 4 sys per page. So any advice on what I am doing wrong or how to do this better would be aprreciated
If you find that the music overlaps when you force four systems per page via fixing the casting off, perhaps you should consider reducing the staff size slightly (on the Page Setup page of Layout Options). It’s also customary in a layout for solo instrument plus piano to make the solo instrument’s staff smaller than the piano staff, normally around 75% of the size of the piano staff. You can do this by selecting a note in the clarinet staff and choosing Edit > Staff Size > 75%.
Hi, having a similar problem; there was a repeat ending causing two systems to be much farther apart than they needed to be, but then when I moved the ending down and away from the rehearsal mark, it didn’t change the system spacing, so there’s a big empty gap in the middle of the lead sheet.
