Staff Spacing? Dorico 5

[ckriegeskotte]

Hi, Team,

Anyone have any tips on managing staff spacing? As a Finale refugee I’m SO tempted to start adjusting things manually, but I’m trying to remain committed to Dorico’s automation.

I’m having an issue where on some pages Dorico imposes an enormous space between systems and pushes all the staves very close together. I would love to have a more uniform spacing throughout my score while enabling condensing and hidden staves.

Here’s an example where Dorico imposed a big gap and squashed the staves so the top system is at the top of the frame and tightly spaced and the lower system is at the very bottom of the fram and tightly space. Any way to reliably even them out?

This one bumped the system to the top and squashed the staves and left like 2/3 of the page blank at the bottom:

My preference would be bigger spaces between staves and less blank space on the page between systems.

Thanks!

[dan_kreider]

This is Vertical Justification, in Layout Options>Vertical Spacing. When your page reaches a certain percentage threshhold, Dorico will expand to fill the frame. You can play with these percentage settings. If you want no change and full control, set them to 100%.

[ckriegeskotte]

Thank you! Yes, I did some more tweaking and I’ve arrived at a happier place. It was a combination of inter-system spacing and adjusting the threshold of the Vertical Justification.

[benwiggy]

Here’s my handy guide to Vertical Justification.

[kaposi.g]

Thanks for sharing this! I managed in many tricky ways vertical justification being unaware of what you’ve said! This will be a great help from now! Thanks!

[JPayne]

Ben: your guide has helped me so much in letting Dorico be Dorico and not trying to make it work like Finale. Thanks for all you do for the Forum.

[ckriegeskotte]

This is excellent, thank you so much! The whole vertical justification concept was a bit of mind-bender for me, but these responses and your excellent guide have really demystified things for me. Thank you!