I’ve got a piece of music I wrote in high school (65 years ago!) that I rendered in Finale a long time ago. Looks great there. Just to see what it would look like, I dumped it to an XML file and opened it with Dorico. To my surprise, it’s not that bad. Most surprising is that it plays back nearly perfectly. The notes and rhythms are all correct, and the dynamics are easily fixable where they aren’t quite right. It’s not an overly complicated piece.
However, the format is way too crowded.
Surely I’m not the first person to ask this, so perhaps a tip or a pointer to the online manual would be sufficient: Is there a quick way to ask Dorico to take a single pass through the file and rethink the layout as if I’d entered all that by hand.
Lynn, yes there is.
Go to Engrave Mode and “Reset Layout”.
If the pages still look cramped vertically, you can go to Layout Options and slightly change the page margins or the space size (size of the staves).
I tried this but it didn’t change a thing that I was able to see.
Interestingly, if I view it in Galley View, the bad formatting disappears. It appears quite nice.
So it’s ONLY the formatting that’s a problem.
I may get back to this because I have some questions about what to do in this case. (Maybe I was doing it wrong.) But first I want to respond to the follow-up reply.
This problem report can be considered solved and closed. In the midst of trying to figure out what was wrong, I did adjust some MusicXML import suggestions, and opened it directly in Dorico. (I’d been trying to create an empty project and import it, which didn’t work.)
The result is as close to perfect as I could hope for in such a blind translation. I should be able to touch it up and be done with it in less than an hour.
My only reservation is I can’t see how anything that I touched would have affected the layout so dramatically. But I’m not willing to dig around to find out because I just want to move on.
The musicXML import options (that you choose) will determine whether Dorico respects the layout of the import file or applies the Dorico options (that you also choose).
I’m sure they do, and assuming that this is what corrected my bad layout (as opposed to, for instance, a magic fairy of "just one of those things), when I went through them and unchecked some things and left checked others, it wasn’t obvious to me just which of those options might do that. Or why. But I’m far from being an expert in Dorico spacing or frames, which is pretty amazing.
I’m now emboldened to try another of my old composition projects to see if it’s as effective.
