First choral/piano project. Watched Dorico channel Youtube videos but can’t find solution. I’ve posted the PDF of two pages - the first shows how Dorico spaces the staves on its own, the second is one I’ve manually spaced. How do I adjust the settings so Dorico gives me something closer to the second page?
What Dorico is doing is stretching out the staves and systems to fill the music frame. In Layout Options > Vertical Spacing > Vertical Justification, you probably want to increase the first threshold and/or untick the first checkbox to prevent this.
Here’s an excellent cheat sheet to help explain the vertical justification settings:
Thanks asherber - followed the PDF guidelines but it made no difference. That page with one system stayed stretched to fill. Billstevns suggestion worked, but I still don’t think that’s how Dorico is intended to work.
On its own, Dorico can do two things: space the staves and systems exactly as specified in Layout Options, or proportionately expand (i.e., justify) the spacing to fill the music frame. The usual approach in Dorico is to adjust global settings so that most of your project looks the way you want it, and only then tweak the rest by hand.
I don’t know whether turning off all justification is the best choice for your project, because I don’t know what the rest of the pages look like. If most of the pages look more or less like this in terms of the number of staves, then you probably don’t want justification. Or you may want to make the music frame on the page template shorter and then let Dorico justify to that, which will space things out somewhat more than the global settings but not as much as the first page in your PDF.
(Note that if you make changes to the page template, you have to remove all page overrides in order for those changes to be applied to the actual pages.
The PDF only gives examples of how changes to those settings are reflected on actual music – they’re not guidelines for recommended settings. (Although the first example, both settings at 100%, is in line with what @billstevns suggested.)
That recommendation definitely made a difference. I hadn’t considered looking at the percentage at the bottom of the page and using that as a guide. Thank you!