Honestly, I don’t know what your current project status is, but from the PDFs provided in the first post, I would delete the layout and create a new one with doricos default. That should get you 90% of the way.
Then, tweak where necessary, with feedback from this forum.
The biggest mistake I did with Dorico when I started out was to try to change everything. I didn’t know what I was doing, changed things which were actually having the opposite effect of each other and had ugly scores.
Lately, I am mainly concerned with the big picture things:
layout/staff size and page margins. Page templates.
system and frame breaks (do them last!)
note spacing changes.
I don’t really touch many other things, only when I have real issues, like collisions.
My scores look better than ever and I am faster too. The rest is just Doricos default engraving. Good enough for any pit musician, because it’s very legible. It’s nothing to be published, but compared to my Sibelius and Finale colleagues, it’s waaaaaay closer to a publishable score.
In the pit, legibility wins over page count. Of course, make smart page turns, and this might lead to a page being only half full, but if it costs more pages, so it be.
Hi klaf and thanks for taking the time to respond. Thanks to the help of a few people here the charts are starting to look way better, and I think I can see through to a future where they’re useable. Starting from scratch isn’t really an option but I took the amended charts to a gig last night and asked a few players who do regular pit work to have a look and the response was quite positive. I can make some notation changes that will help the situation.
Special thanks must be given to Lillie Harris. She took the time to help and the chart looks night and day different. Really what she did was what you’re suggesting - ‘Undo’ on all my unnecessary attempts to change things manually. Way too many System Breaks, Frame Breaks, changes to Casting Off, and way too much manual dragging around of chart elements.
I don’t know why I’m so hesitant to leave a page less than full. I have to get over it.
I know this feeling, I had it too a lot. I think it’s from seeing this very well engraved old editions, where space really was at a premium, and or the editions were small paperbacks for travel/study. There surely is a good black/white ratio for sheet music, but I learned that for pits, the ratio should in doubt be on the “white”, not the “black” side…