I’m transitioning from Finale and currently working on my first project with Dorico—and so far, I’m loving it! However, I’ve encountered a small issue on a specific page. I’ve added an ossia to show the sounding pitches of some violin harmonics, but the system divider doesn’t seem to be vertically centered.
From what I’ve found, there doesn’t seem to be a native way to adjust the positioning of system dividers. I was wondering if anyone knows of a workaround to achieve a more visually balanced placement. The alternative would be editing the exported PDF in a PDF editor to manually reposition the divider, but I’d prefer to avoid this solution since it requires repeating the process every time you re-export, which is easy to forget.
Update: I found a workaround to solve the issue directly in Dorico, although it’s not very elegant. I created a short ossia below the last staff of the first system to push the system divider down and make it appear vertically centered. Then, I hid the ossia using some white text with the “erase background” property turned on.
It works visually, but it creates complications when extracting parts. Does anyone have a better idea or a more streamlined solution to this problem?
This looks indeed as if there should be a solution for these occurrences. As an interim you could trick Dorico into giving the system divider a better position here by adding a very low note into the cello (?) system in bar 57 and make that note invisible.
[edit] your own workaround seems to be an elegant solution
I completely agree—it would be great to have the ability to adjust system dividers for cases like this. That said, I really like your solution! It’s definitely simpler than the workaround I found, which involved creating an ossia and hiding it with white text.
Thanks for sharing your idea—it’s much appreciated!
Yes, sorry—I’m still used to Finale vocabulary. What I meant is that when selecting the part with the hidden ossia, it takes up some unwanted space that I have to manually adjust. Is there a way to delete the ossia only in the part layout while keeping it intact in the full score?
That said, I’m happy to hear that this is on the development team’s to-do list, as it’s one of the very few issues I’ve encountered since working with Dorico (along with the cutaway scores feature, which has been discussed several times on the forum).
