System and frame breaks

Trying to have 3 systems per frame for a 6-system piece. The second frame is very happy to have 3 systems but even though there is plenty of space for a 3rd system on p.1, no matter how I arrange system breaks it forces the 3rd system onto frame2 (which moves system 6 onto an unwanted 3rd frame). Help! (can’t figure how to attach screenshot)

In Dorico, you generally want to try to adjust per-layout settings to get what you’re looking for, and only add breaks or manually systems at the end. Here’s a recent thread where some options were discussed:

If you’d like to upload your Dorico project file, someone can take a look and offer suggestions. To upload a file, either drag it directly into the edit box here, or click the upload button.

image

If you take a screenshot, you can also just paste it directly from your clipboard into the edit box.

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AA-x Abide in my love.dorico (709.0 KB)
Here’s the upload. Except for the refrain, the piece is in free meter, one reason why I put in system breaks manually. But I’m still pretty new to Dorico so I can believe there are lots of better ways to do things. Hopefully the above got you the file - at least, that gobbeldygook is what appeared when I “uploaded”… It’s the piano part I’m trying to adjust. Voice part I believe I have formatted successfully…

The piano part is currently only 5 systems and fits on 2 pages. Can you say more about what you’re trying to accomplish?


Here’s how in looks in my Windows computer.

I don’t think that’s the same version of the file as the one that you uploaded, which has a part name and a title on the first page.

Sorry, well duh, I guess I hadn’t saved the changes when I sent the file off to you! Let me send the file now that I’ve made the changes. Meanwhile, I’ll also say, I’m trying some more formatting in the voice part and seem to have a similar problem - no matter how much space I create on 1st frame, top system of 2nd frame doesn’t move to 1st frame.
AA-x Abide in my love.dorico (683.5 KB)

In this case, the fix for this particular issue is pretty straightforward. On your first page, you’ve moved the first system above the start of the music frame (green box), but I think Dorico is still calculating available space based on the frame.

Here are the steps I followed:

  1. In Engrave mode, select the Staff Spacing tool. Three of the systems have a red line on top, indicating that they have been moved. Ctrl/Cmd+click the red boxes at the left of each box, so that they’re all selected, and hit Backspace. This returns the systems to their original positions.
  2. In the right panel of Engrave mode, click on one of the page tiles, then right-click and choose Remove All Page Overrides. This re-syncs the pages with their templates.
  3. Since you don’t want the part name and title on the first page, select the page 1 tile. Right-click and choose Insert Page Template Change, make sure the dialog says from page 1, use Default, current page only, and hit OK. Now that the first page is using the Default template instead of the First Page template, the text boxes disappear and the music frame gets taller – and you’ve got three systems on a page.

This is not necessarily the “best” way to fix this; it feels like you really might want to create a new page template, maybe without the remaining page header, or you might want to edit the existing templates so that they look the way you want them for the parts. (If you delete the header from the template, it will disappear from both parts.) But those are more involved processes, and this gets you where I think you want more quickly.

This also shows the Dorico principle of starting high-level and then working lower. By working with the templates instead of moving individual things around by hand, you let Dorico’s layout algorithms do their thing.

Here’s the updated file. I did the same thing with the soprano part.

AA-x Abide in my love EDITED.dorico (713.2 KB)

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Great! Many thanks - as you say, worked very easily.