System and bar spacing in Elements

Dorico
1

I keep coming up against engraving options that aren’t available in Elements so am struggling to arrange things on the page.

Two things I used a lot on my previous software were changing the width of one or more bars, to spread things out and fill up the page(s); and changing the distance between one, more, or all systems to fill up and balance the number of systems on each page. What’s the easiest way to achieve them in Elements? Can I select a number of systems and then gradually increase their distance using a keyboard shortcut?

For example, I have a piece for solo flute that on its three pages has 6, 9 and 4 systems, I’d like to stretch out page 2 so it has 6, 7 and 6 systems.

2

There are plenty of tools available in Elements.

You can change Note-Spacing and Vertical Spacing in Layout options, and you can use system and frame breaks, too.

In Dorico, dragging around stuff is usually not the way to go to achieve big scheme Lay-out things.

3

Yeah I get that, and it’s actually one of the reasons why I like Dorico. It would be handy though to be able to increase something common like system distance or bar width with a keyboard shortcut and see its effects immediately, rather than going into a menu and having to click ‘apply’ and then close the menu to see what difference it made, which is what I had to do through trial and error. It worked though so thank you.