Staff Spacing, distance between quarter notes

I am very happy using the upgrade; everything works fine.
Two things would help working with dorico:

  1. Staff spacing: it would be very fine, if one could define the distance between staves from bottom to top: define the bottom staff with say 0,00 mm and then define the distance to the next staff above by typing say 13,00 mm and so on. The bottom staves should remain in their place and the next staff above should be nudged upwards.
    So the layout of the two pages side by side could look fine with both bottom staves at the same height and easy defining equal distances between the above staves.
  2. In the layout options you can define the distance between crotchets, but only global. It would be fine to define the distance between crotchets separately for each flow. Often in quick movements like Allegro or Presto there are only half notes/quarter notes/eight notes; the distance between crotchets need not be very wide. On the other hand in some slow movements there are sixteenth and thirtysecond notes; there you need much more space.

Thanks for your brilliant work and for taking care of your customers so nicely and helpfully!
Margret

Thanks for your feedback, Margret. Regarding your second point, you will be able to do this in the next update once the note spacing change object is working properly; you can create such an object today (via Engrave > Note Spacing Change) but you can’t actually change the note spacing values yet. We’re currently working on a dialog that will allow you to do this.

I suspect your first point is something you can achieve using the new “Staff Spacing” in the left panel, and then the Copy Staff Spacing button. There must be a procedure to make it exactly as you wish. It is easy to make it, when the master pages are from the same type. There is some reajustment when switching from First to Default, because the music frame is shorter in the First (© information).

Oups, Daniel was already responding…

Thanks for the quick answers, Daniel and Marc.
to Marc: “Copy Staff spacing” does work only if there is the same number of staves on the respective pages.
For me it would be ideal, if the vertikal staff presets and the horizontal spacing presets were both part of the notation options - for each flow separately. After having defined good presets, only a little finetuning in Engrave Modus would be necessary. As I write many Scores for Solo violin, the differences in spacing from movement to movement are big. And you have always to consider the page turns …
Have a nice day
Margret

That’s good news, Daniel! Just as Margret, I need different spacing algorithms for different movements. Finale has a large collection of different spacing libraries for this purpose (and you can make your own) and it’ll be a welcome addition to version 1.0.20. I’d always wondered what the ‘Note Spacing Change’ was for. Does it have other uses besides this?

No, that’s basically what it’s for: a means of changing the note spacing from a particular rhythmic position until further notice, and you can create a further note spacing change that resets the values back to those defined for the layout in Layout Options, or to a different set of changed values as needed.

Nice! Might I suggest that if one does create a note spacing change, Dorico puts a flag at that spot so we can see what we’ve done?

That’s of course exactly what it does, provided you have View > Signposts > Note Spacing Change switched on so you can see it.