I cannot seem to change the staff size of a line of two condensed instruments. They are a custom-condensing group of Vihuela, Guitar, and Guitarrón. In Galley View, all instruments are at the custom size I want, but in Page View the condensed line remains at full size. Selecting an element (which one is more or less restricted to do, but you can select the clef at least) and changing the Staff Size does nothing.
Is there anything to be done? Some step I’m missing? Thanks kindly.
Had you changed the staff size of the other staves, a lá Finale? That’s not how you’re supposed to do it. Instead, change size via Layout Options—Page Setup—Space Size.
Though I haven’t tried this use case, I imagine the size of a condensed staff will be whatever you’ve set as the space size for that layout.
Dan I believe you misunderstand me. I want only the condensed instrument line smaller, not every line in the layout. The context is a vocal score where I need to show these instruments in the movements they play, but a pianist does not need them at full-size.
EDIT: Although, I suppose I could reduce all of the staff sizes and merely increase the sizes manually of every other line, but this would be a nightmare across 10 principal singers and twenty flows…
Gotcha. At the moment, that appears to be your best bet. There’s no way to do much of anything with condensed staves at present.
In an interview, Daniel mentioned that more controls are coming over condensing before the end of the year. Whether or not that will include scaling is yet to be seen.
No, it’s unlikely to include scaling.
Daniel, may I ask if you mean scaling would not be likely to be one of the items “before the end of the year” or do you mean scaling for condensed staves is not intended to be supported in the future?
It’s not going to be supported before the end of the year, I feel reasonably sure. Whether it will be supported in the future? Never say never! But it’s tricky, because unlike the staves belonging to single players, the staves used by condensed players can change from system to system, so there’s not a single staff or set of staves carried throughout the layout, and there’s nowhere obvious for the required data to live. But all things are surmountable given sufficient will and time.
Lord, you’re right. It seems a shame that your punishment for providing such great solutions to notation conundrums is even more conundrums! It’s like antibiotic-resistant bacteria!
I ran into this problem for the first time now, too. It’s tricky to create workarounds for this issue, especially in a large score for many players.
Now that some time has passed, I’m wondering if there’s been any updates on this issue? Might we expect a solution in an upcoming patch?
No, there’s been no update on this issue, and it’s not something that I would expect to change in the near term. I’d be interested to learn more about your requirements, though, tpaloj, in case there might be some other possible solution.
In my case, I’m preparing a large vocal score in which I wanted to indicate the singers’ and choral parts in smaller staff size than the piano part. Most of the time (but not on every page), I need to condense the SATB choral parts into two staves for space reasons.
I think I can manage by just using two uncondensed staves for the chorus (using up-and-down stems for the voices), even if some extra tweaking will have to be done in the part extraction stage. No worries. Thank you Daniel, as always, your support and assistance is very welcome!
With the way condensing works for vocal/choral music at the moment, I think you’ll probably find it preferable to use uncondensed staves in any case, because there’s not enough control over how Dorico disposes lyrics e.g. above and below the staff in the case of dissimilar rhythms. There is more work for us to do in this area, certainly.
Hello, I know this is an old thread, but I wanted to bump this topic because I have run into the same problem on my current project and there still doesn’t seem to be a convenient way around this problem.
I am notating a SATB choral piece with a substantial piano accompaniment. I’ve notated the vocal parts on 4 staves and have used system-by-system condensing changes along with selectively deleting lyrics from some voices for certain passages to get the condensing feature to behave as desired (sometimes showing 4 staves, sometimes 2, sometimes 1, depending on what the voices are doing at any given time). Much of the piano part is on three staves and isn’t particularly useful to the singers so I’ve omitted it entirely from my vocal score layout and I’ll be making a separate score for the pianist.
My vision for the piano score is to have the piano part at full size, and then include the choral parts as 2 condensed staves at 60% staff size above the piano. Currently there is no way to achieve this, unless I re-notate the choral parts of the flow on a grand staff as two new players (or perhaps as a piano with lyrics) just for the purposes of including them in the piano score layout.
I’d be interested to hear if anyone has any suggestions. I can’t wait for the long-discussed improvements to condensing for choral scores. Condensing is such a great feature when it works, but it does take some unintuitive steps to make it work elegantly for choral music.
I am absolutely reaching here since I’m not at a computer with Dorico, but perhaps you could set a system break and change the System-wide staff size to be as small as you want the condensed staves to be, then in the edit menu set the Staff Size for the piano larger. I know that’s coming at it from the other direction, but this might work?
Hey, thanks for this thought! It looks like this would be the way to get what I’m looking for. I tried it, and it gave me some weird spacing around the condensed staves, but it’s close enough that I can manually adjust the vertical spacing and get something that will work. Great idea.
However, this leaves me with some weird lyric doubling above and below each condensed staff like you usually get with condensing choral staves right now. I have the lyrics input just so to get the choral score to look right, and I would have to change where lyrics appear to get them to appear correctly on the piano score. I guess I’ll finalize my choral score, export it, then change the choral parts to get it to look right on the piano score afterwards.