I have an engraving issue that is extremely frustrating. I’m trying to fit all the staves of a part on one page. I’ve gotten to the point where I have the last stave with too many bars, and I simply want to move these bars to the next stave in the same frame. However, every time I do this it moves the selected bars to a new page.
I’ve tried any number of frame resizing, layout options, adding frames and anything else I can think of to do this seemingly simple task, but it is not working.
I’ve attached 3 grabs - where I start, the bars I select and the result after I click “move bars to next system”. As can be seen, this does not work
Dorico is good, but this engraving palava is absolutely the most frustrating pile of worms I have to deal with. Can aybody please help?
It’s a little hard to tell what’s happening without seeing the project file. Maybe you’ve got a page override?
But I would suggest removing all of those system breaks (or Reset Layout, which is the same thing) and then changing the note spacing for that layout to have a smaller default space for quarter notes. If you lower it a little at a time, you’ll get all those bars on one page.
I had a try with the note spacing, after resetting, but it’s still difficult for me. I don’t understand the extra blank page, even after resetting. I’ll attach the file. If you’ve got the time to look at it that would be great, but I’ll keep trying to figure this out so no problem if you’d rather not…
If this now looks like what you want, I’ll explain it in a few minutes - it takes longer to document the steps than it does to do them.
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What I did was:
Layout Options > Vertical Spacing, reduce the Inter-system gap to 8 spaces
In Engrave mode, right-click on the first page in the right panel and choose Remove All Page Overrides
In Engrave mode > Staff Spacing sub-mode, drag-select all the square red edit handles at the start of the staves and press Delete
In Layout Options > Note Spacing, reduce Default space for crotchet/quarter note to 3 spaces, and reduce Minimum space for short notes to 1 1/8 spaces
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I have just now noticed that the changes I made were to the Full Score layout. You might experiment for yourself on the actual Bari Sax layout. If you do, make sure that the correct layout is selected (on the righthand side) in Layout Options. Also, you might want to make the margins in the Bari Sax layout the same as in the Full Score layout.
P.S. On a totally different matter, everything from bar 46 on is two beats late and there is an extra 2/4 bar at about 75 to accommodate the discrepancy.
So I’m clearly not understanding the basic logic of Engraving in Dorico. I’m assuming each page is, by default, 1 frame. If I have a score or part that is too spread out to fit on 1 page, my approach is to work from the top downwards. I’ll select extra bars in the second system and use “move to previous system” command to correct the first system spacing, and then work my way through the document this way. The problem seems to arise when I try to move systems from the next page onto the first page, even though I have created space inside the frame through this approach, as well as dragging individual staff lines up to create the necessary space.
My confusion is with using frames, which seem to add an extra dimension to how the engraving process works. I’m trying to get my head around this. But thank you everybody for your help, it’s certainly very much appreciated.
True, but the staves will automatically flow from one frame to the next. You don’t normally have to think much about frames at all.
This will never do what you want, but rather create problems for you.
You can indeed work with moving bars between systems, but it is not the most efficient way; it is better to adjust the settings as Steven has explained.
There are many different ways to achieve the result you want; another way to put a certain amount of systems on a page is to use Casting off (systems per page), or Make into frame. But you will have to reset your layout first as described above.
Btw, that is also doable with the so called Jump Bar.
Hit “J” to invoke it, and then type
Remove all page overrides (enter)
Reset staff spacing (enter)
You can even set the inter-system gap with the jump bar. Just type “Inter-system gap” and hit enter, type 6 or something else in the dialogue.
Please don’t do that (you will only become increasingly frustrated). The ‘trick’ with Dorico is to experiment to find the set of layout options that generally suits your music genre/style. Once done, you should only need to make very few manual changes. If you are making lots of changes then your basic option settings are wrong!
There are different kinds of frames that can be on a page and even multiples of each typeof frame — they are ‘containers. Typically, a page has one music frame (and possibly a number of text frames for headings and footers). The frames have identifiers to allow the music to flow from one to the next.
If you ‘tinker’ too much with manual adjustments you can disrupt the flow and get undesirable results. It’s best to get your Engraving, Layout, and Notation options set to get as close as possible to what you want before making any changes.
