I am on episode 1 of converting from Finale. It took an evening to get music in.
I get 16 pages of full score on the Engrave and Print tabs, one system per page.
However, two pages have systems that are extremely short, just over half the page. The other systems fill the pages. This looks really funky.
The number of staves is the same on all the pages. Is there any setting to even the systems out?
On the 14 full pages there is a lot of space between staves. On Finale I would increase the font side to make the pages more readiable. Is there something similar on Dorico? I’d rather go bigger and have more pages than large white space between staves.
Thank for the tips. While playing aroud last night, I changed the page size and the small systems went away.
This created another problem:
In condensed view, everything looks OK but with condensed turned off, the staves were on top of each other and the file was uneditable.
It there any setting for dealing with condensed and noncondensed view differences?
If you have condensing activated, I suggest to use the Gally view (in Write mode) to edit your music.
But generally I would suggest to activate condensing only when you have inputted all your music, and start then editing the layout. And shrink the Rastral size, as suggest above, so that all the staves have more space on the page.
There is also the global Note spacing options , that are very useful if you want to shrink the horizontal spacing of your score (and you can adjust as needed. Default value is 4. Try to shrink that value and it will immediately repaginate your layout):
@Big_Jim_Slade, to add to @Christian_R’s suggestion, you can add note spacing changes wherever you want in Engrave Mode (Engrave>Note Spacing change…)
Thanks for all the help so far. While I am here is there any similar setting for horizontal spacing?
In my first conversion attempt, my full score of 25 pp. generally has 8–9 measures per system (on system per page). The page has 2 measures. I’d like to balance things out a bit.
I’ve got a high hill to climb with so many file to convert. Most of my problems have been solved in the FAQs and videos. The system is generally intuitive to use. Entering notes is still problematic at this point but fortunately, I am generally just doing cut and paste. I need to learn the page layout features as well. Fortunately, no “THIS TOTALLY SUCKS!” so far.
First of all, I’d suggest changing the Note Spacing value in Layout Options. The default is 4 spaces. If you want to make it fit a whole number of pages evenly, then “bring it in” by lowering the value; or “push it out” by increasing.
I generally recommend going down to 3.5, at least.
You can also make Note Spacing changes, under the Engrave menu (at the current selection point). This is really useful for, say, making 3/8 a bit more spaced out, but if you’ve got a section in 3/2, you can tighten it up. It also means you can give different Flows different spacings.
After that, then you may want to add a couple of System Breaks here and there. Some recommend locking every system with breaks: but then you can’t change the spacing or reflow for any reason easily.
