Staves not aligning

Staves are not alining in Full score at the instrument change from Bass Clarinet to Clarinet

Could you share a picture (or even better, a project file) that shows the problem? Quite difficult to diagnose from your description.

Thanks. The non-alignment I speak of occurs at bar 48: Bass Clarinet to Clar. in Bb

Hilaritas score and parts copy.dorico (3.3 MB)

This is something I experienced, when I’ve used the manual staff placement in Engrave mode. Especially with concertina drag. Then made some musical modifications and bam, the staves no longer align. The easy fix is to select all red squares in that Engrave sub-mode and hit delete. Everything blue again, and all staves align again. Then concertina drag gives the expected result.
Have you been following such steps?

Ah, got it. The culprit were your staff spacing overrides, when I deleted those the staves aligned again. I’m assuming you made some overrides and then changed the placement of the system breaks.

In general I’d advise you to leave more of the staff spacing to Dorico, pretty much every page has tons of overrides. For the pages with just two systems, you could make a separate Master Page in which the music frames aren’t as tall. Also experiment with the Vertical Spacing settings under Layout Options, as well as the Music Frame Margins in Page Setup—I’m sure you can get a result you like with less effort, and less unexpected behaviour down the line.

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Yes, thanks, that was it. I was already concerned that I had made far too many staff spacing overrides and will take your advice. Thanks

It’s because of your staff spacing overrides - select the red handle at the start of the instrument change and press Delete.

On a side note, you’ve got a lot of staff spacing overrides - that isn’t necessarily a problem, but I wonder if looking elsewhere might be quicker and produce more consistent results more easily in future. For example, for pages where you want 2 systems on the page but starting lower and ending higher than when you have 3 systems, create a new master page with a shorter music frame and apply that master page to the relevant pages.

Here’s your project back with a couple of tweaks, with your first page set up on the First master page (rather than a page override) and a shorter master page applied to some pages (and staff spacing overrides removed). I hid the flow heading in Layout Options rather than deleting the frame. I adjusted your vertical spacing settings - reducing the “Ideal Gaps” between staves but slightly increasing the “Minimum gaps” when other items are present (like dynamics, slurs etc). Here’s some explanation of the vertical spacing settings - basically set the ones at the top to the smallest you’d accept, then add on extra space elsewhere, such as in minimum gaps. You shouldn’t generally need to drag staves around much in Dorico if you spend a bit of time adjusting those layout options.

Hilaritas score and parts copy_LH.dorico (1.3 MB) (<- playback template set to Silence for a smaller file size)

(Lastly - I notice you have “Variation X” text objects throughout - if you want these to be fully separate pieces of music, you can of course split this one flow into multiple flows, and allow them to follow on the same page as a previous flow if you want. The benefit of separate flows being the ability to show automatic flow headings, the design of which you can customize.)

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