Hello!
Is there a way to avoid text collisions?
I’m working at a piece with a narrator, with a lot of text and I keep running in to these kind of situations (see pictures attached, below/above staff).
Any help on how to avoid this? It’s making me do way more manual tweaking than I would like…
Hi @Hanhom – maybe take a look at this page about margins, in particular the music frame margin. It sets the gap between the top of music frames and the top staff line below, it doesn’t increase/decrease when there’s text or very high notes, for example. The same is true for margins below flow headings.
To accommodate the large text item at the start of your flow, you could insert a flow heading change just on this page, use the standard Default flow heading, but increase the flow heading bottom margin to increase the gap between the flow heading and the top of the music.
Thank you, I will take a look!
Lillie,
Hope it makes sense to open this older thread: may I ask about the logic why text blocks on the top of the page don’t affect the spacing? Situations like these bellow keep reappearing, perhaps I am missing something in the Dorico workflow:
In terms of hierarchy, the text blocks relate to sub-part names within a flow and the larger blocks with borders are spoken text, similar to what Hanhom described in her post above.
Thanks for any suggestions!
For the first image, you’d want to increase the flow heading bottom margin. For the second, that might work better in a text frame (although that would require handling in each layout, adding the text frame and making space for it, unless it occurred in a similar place on each page in all the parts and you could make a page template for that setup).
Dorico determines gaps between things like flow headings and the top staff line, rather than items that protrude above/below the staff, in order to get consistent spacing by default. When you do need to alter these gaps, there are tools available.
(That said, speaking personally for a moment with my Dorico-user hat on, I think it would be nice one day if flow headings were able to expand/contract automatically depending on the amount of space required for text, as you could then include things like dialogue at the beginning of a flow in the flow heading.)
I actually have used that technique on an opera score I’ve been working on, to input the text cues. You can create custom flow headings, so I created one flow heading for almost each flow, and then Change Flow Headings in Engrave mode. Very nice. But of course, if that could be automatic, it would be nice too 
