I’m working on a pedagogy document created in Finale and ported to Dorico 5 Pro. In Finale I’m able to set margins via a dialogue box using numbers. Thus far, in Dorico, I’m only able to reset a right margin by selecting “Note Spacing”, highlighting the large red box at the bottom right of the staff and sit for a “few minutes” waiting for the left arrow key to move the staff margin. Is there a simpler way to do this via dialogue boxes and numbers?? I’ve tried all sorts of key combinations to no avail as well as searching the menus. At some point, I’ll need to also have 2 single measures on the same horizontal plane with a text block in between them.
This is an example where Dorico and Finale works very differently. The suggested place to change margins is in the Layout Options (the meny is below Library). Here you can give numbers. Layout in Dorico is a quite deep subject and I am not able to give any good description.
Basically what we want to do is setup as much as possible in the global settings and page templates and do as little tweaking as possible in the actual layout. There is some info in this video.
I think there is a much better video showing this, but right now I cannot find it. Don’t give up though.
Hi Kerry – It sounds like you are using the note spacing tool to indent individual systems because they contain separate material. If so, in that mode you can reset any red box to zero (its default position) by selecting it and pressing Backspace.
This applies to red adjustment handles in Engrave generally, in all modes.
But I am curious to see a sample of what you’re trying to do. It may be that you are hand-tweaking something Finale-style that could be handled by a global setting in Dorico.
Yes, I’m using the note spacing tool as it’s the only way I’ve found to tweak the staff systems. I’m not certain a global setting is the way to go since many of the staff systems are spaced differently based on their contents.
I’ve attached the first page of the original document as a pdf file.
I would suggest doing this in a very different way. Make each musical snippet its own flow, and then use engrave mode to put all the flows on one page along with the text boxes you need. I used this method to create worksheets in Dorico before:
Each block of notation there (all 6 of them on the page) is entered as a different flow (movement) but then brought onto one page by creating multiple music frames in engrave mode, each of which displays that tiny movement in the pane.
This sort of page, with very small staff examples, is arguably easier to produce in a page layout program, with music pasted in as graphics. Dorico has a full facility for saving graphic slices from a score, if you want to go that route.
I might agree depending on how long and complex it is. For the two page document that I made in Dorico entirely (the second page is above) it wasn’t too bad. I did it more as an experiment to see whether I could do it entirely in Dorico. Certainly there would be advantages to using a word processor or full DTP for such things, like bulleted list / numbered list functionality and other such things and advanced formatting options, and just bring in the music snippets as graphics. For a longer document this would make sense, but for a short one like the one I made, I sorta like having everything in Dorico in one file.
