Apparently, the default mode for scores appears to be portrait mode on A3 paper. I changed to Landscape Mode and selected 8.5x14 paper (nearly every jazz score I’ve ever seen is printed in Landscape Mode), and I got this result:
Wow. This is terrible. Now, I hope that some kind people will come along and say “tweak these settings and it will look better,” and for that I’m surely grateful. However, I also feel like I have to ask: are the developers of Dorico OK with this result? Why should I have to tweak a bunch of parameters to get a merely decent-looking score just because I chose Landscape Mode? I came from Finale, and while it had its issues, clicking on Landscape Mode for scores made great-looking scores. The parts (in Dorico) came out beautifully … the score is simply unusable. Thanks in advance for your advice.
You’re right that Dorico doesn’t automatically adjust the rastral size (staff size) when you change from portrait orientation to landscape orientation. That’s probably the only adjustment you need to make: choose Library > Layout Options and on the Page Setup page, reduce the rastral size by two sizes (e.g. if you’ve currently got size 3 chosen, choose size 5), then click Apply and Close.
Usually it requires one or two to get things looking right, and because every project is different, and every user has various kinds of layout and engraving preferences, an automatic setting “force everything to fit” would probably be more frustrating than helpful. In the case of your score, I have a feeling everything would have to be painfully tiny to read if forced down in scale.
In addition to what Daniel mentioned, it appears like you could probably solve most of it by turning on condensing (Edit > Condensing). It’s hard to tell but it looks like a lot of the brass is doubled and/or unison and you would instantly save a lot of vertical space this way.
And nearly every Classical score is printed in Portrait (we’ve been doing it so for hundreds of years ).
Once you have sorted out settings that suit your needs, save as a Project Template, or import settings from one project to another using the Library Manager.
If you don’t mind me piling on the suggestions, it looks like you can put the Music Frame Margins (under Layout Options > Page Setup) quite a bit smaller than you have them now.
Hello 1841house,
yes, Dorico will do the layout almost automatically - at first glance of your screenshot, you are on the way to a phenomenal looking score, I’ll promise You are still in charge of your work by
a) defining the Layout Orientation - which you already did: Landscape
b) choosing your Paper Size - which you already did: 8.5x14
c) setting a rastral size - use @dspreadbury’s suggestion to reduce the staff height by changing its rastral value.
Thanks, everyone, for the suggestions. dspreadbury’s suggestion regarding rastral size fixed most of it (FYI, rastral size is now set to not 3, not 5, not 8, but “Custom” at 0.73mm!); and thank you hrnbouma for “piling on” as I was just about to ask how to reduce the margins to better use vertical space. The score looks a lot prettier now! My experience here is is similar to other areas, having moved from Finale to Dorico: on the one hand, it’s an extremely powerful program, and no matter what you are looking to do, there’s a tweak or setting to take care of it. On the other hand, it seems to NEED a lot of setting and tweaking to get things the way I want them … I think Finale was a bit more intuitive in that regards, but I’m trying very hard to put Finale in the rearview mirror and do nothing but Dorico going forward, so this kind of learning experience is extremely helpful. Thanks!
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