The spacing of music on a page when inserting a second ending bar

I’m writing an orchestral score. It starts with the first 16 bars repeated. I then decided to insert an extra bar after the 16th bar and create a first and second ending. That all worked well. The first ending ends one page, and the second ending begins the next page. But I find that the page with the second ending looks cramped to me, with some accidentals colliding with notes, even though in Engrave mode it’s showing as only 76.6% full. I know how to push bars onto the next page, but is there a way to get Dorico to re-space the music itself to avoid collisions between elements?

Hi, Gary, and welcome to the forum!

I wonder if you have already manually set some system or frame breaks. If so, I suggest that you delete those breaks to let the automatic spacing rules take effect. If you don’t see the System (or Frame) Break signposts, make sure you have those signposts enabled (via the Jump Bar or the View Menu –> Signposts.

If this isn’t the issue, it might help to share a screenshot or file.

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Oh, thanks so much! There were frame breaks on every page, and I’ve removed them and everything is spaced much better. I wonder if the issue was that this is a score that I started years ago in Finale, and then imported recently into Dorico as a Music XML file. Perhaps it was trying to preserve some of the formatting I had specified in Finale.

There’s so much to learn with Dorico, but I really love this program! Thank you James for your help.

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Under Dorico->Preferences->MusicXml-Import, you can untick most of the boxes so Dorico can handle the Layout.

Jesper

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Thanks for that, Jesper.

It may seem counterintuitive, but unchecking most of those XML import boxes gives Dorico more freedom to do what it wants to do (based on what your settings are), rather than “locking in” however it was in the old document.

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