Dear collective wisdoom,
I have staves colliding in my score left and right (see attached image). I’ve tried several spatium sizes for the score, but on some pages there are still collisions, no matter what I do. This is not an imported score, it was first made in Dorico (albeit 6.0, now working on the newest version, so some transformation must have taken place).
What did I do wrong, and how can I fix it?
Thanks in advance!
And no, there is no fixed number of systems defined, I checked. It works well on some other pages, but not on this one and on some others either. The question really is, why are there 2 systems on this page?
Always difficult to say. But if you increase the distance between systems in layout options, you should be able to autmatically get a single system on this page also.
Daniel Spreadbury has explained that in some old threads. It involves circular computing, speed and under the hood problems…
Thank you both! While increasing the distance did not work, reading the old threads gave me an idea that I am not the only one with this problem.
I eventually did a “factory settings” attempt and then tried several staff size versions before it eventually produced some kind of manageable result.
This really needs to be addressed though (reading the old threads makes me think it was already this way in Dorico 5). I have been bragging to my colleagues about Dorico producing good looking results very easily, other than Sibelius that was famous for screwing up collision checks, and now this rather major issue in Dorico appears impossible to overcome?
This is very easy to overcome. Firstly, choosing a suitable staff size for the ensemble and the page size. No default will be the right size for every use case.
Secondly, things like the floating bar rest in bar 90 are adding needlessly to the vertical height. There is plenty of white spaces that could be reduced by changing the Minimum gaps (including the Collision Avoidance gaps).
The easiest fix is of course just to add a Frame Break on the lower system.
Dorico’s automatic handling is pretty good in 99.9% of cases, but that doesn’t absolve the user of checking it! 
When this occurs to me, I change staff size massively what ‘wakes up’ Dorico and makes proper changes in the layout. Than I switch back to the original size and everything is healed. It is strange but easy and quick and solves the problem most of the time…
First: thanks for noticing the floating bar rest, as I had previously overlooked that. I think it stems from the “unison” starting on the second note rather than on the first. Yet I fail to understand why the floating bar rest with no eighth rest before the notes would be proper behaviour here, so there might be another “strangeness” lurking right there.
However, fixing this by moving the unis. to the first beat did not resolve the problem.
The formatting still works with one particular staff size only. “No default will be the right size for every use case” should not mean that the page formatting only works properly with one particular staff size (if at all). I would think of the staff size as a way to balance your page turning against readability through note size rather than as guesswork and live-with-it-adjustments in order to not have the systems collide.
The frame break btw. will only move the problem to the next page.
This tends to occur when there’s some vertical stack of objects pushing the staves much farther apart than Dorico expected based on the layout options. In this case, in bar 90 there are dynamics, playing techniques and divisi indications all stacking up, and if the settings were relatively tight to begin with, it may cause this kind of overlap. In the casting-off algorithm, essentially this specific edge case is ‘sacrificed’ in order to avoid recursion and make the calculation speedy enough for daily use.
Consider how the staves look without the divisi change back to unison:
As you can see, the middle stave has a bar rest, with nothing demarcating the second eighth-note like in the other staves. So Dorico will start displaying the middle stave by drawing the bar rest, then the unison switch happens, and then it draws C-Bb-C copying the top stave, resulting in the strangeness. You could remedy this by putting an explicit 8th-note rest in the middle stave, like this:
(put the caret on the barline, then press:
O for Force Duration
, for Input Rests
5 for eighth-notes
Y for an unpitched note
)
Thank you very much!
