Staff spacing when staves have Staff Text

Sorry to burst your bubble, but flow headings don’t automatically adjust the height of text frames as needed - that would be a bit magic! If you’re experimenting in the project I sent earlier in this thread, I changed the text alignment in the flow heading to “bottom” and made the frame tall enough to have a 3rd line of text (as that best fitted the first few examples).

For longer variations, you could have different flow headings that you can apply as required, but as flow heading changes apply to whole pages currently, that might not be much use and therefore manual overrides to adjust individual flow heading text frames could be required.

(Tip: All fields in Project Info can technically span multiple lines - you just need to copy/paste the text in from elsewhere where you’ve given it the appropriate paragraph formatting. You can use one of the larger fields in the dialog or an external text editor. The same is true for player and layout names.)

Should it not be easier to left the flow heading model empty, an than to enter manually the text in each flow heading ? So we wouldn’t have to go through the window of the project info.

Sure, but then you’d have a page override. Not always a bad thing, just best to avoid if possible.

It’s a pity that Dorico is only able to adjust staff spacing to accommodate staff text when the text is between two systems or two staves. This means that any introductory texts, like performance or stage directions, cues, etc. require manual positioning. For a number of genres, this is a fairly common requirement and it would be very helpful if Dorico could take such texts into account when laying out a page, thereby saving a lot of time and avoiding the need for page overrides.

1 Like

I think Dorico does account for text between flows - it certainly adjusts the gaps between flows when you add/delete text from the first staff in a new flow. You could also use flow headings to manage gaps between flows at a higher level, whether you want to show flow headings or not: if you don’t, just remove all the tokens from the flow heading but leave them shown in the layout. You can then use the margins above/below flow headings to control the gaps between flows (and with flow heading changes, you can do this on a per-page basis too).

But Dorico doesn’t account for text attached to the first staff of a page, regardless of whether that system is at the beginning or in the middle of a flow. If it did, wouldn’t it be much simpler to add such text than by having to create multiple flow headers and page overrides?

1 Like