Tricks to get a good vertical Staff alignments?

Dorico
1

Hello everyone,

I am working on score with around 40 staffs, and basically every page you need to reorganize your view as a conductor. Meaning, that on one page, the trumpets are in the middle of the page, on the next one they appear on the bottom. There is a lot of texts going on and Dorico is doing a great job handling this, but I would like to improve this.

One possibility would be, to move the staffs manually, but this seems to be only possible one by one. Is there a possibility, to squeeze several selected staffs together? Or has anyone other tricks, to tackle this task? Even by reducing the space size, so that the ertical space drops below 100%, Dorico won’t align the staffs.

Thank you very much!
MusiChronos

2

You’ve got a few options available, including:

  1. Use condensing to reduce the number of staves required in the score.
  2. Reduce the staff size a little (especially if your pages are frequently over 100% full already)
  3. Turn off staff spacing collision avoidance (in the Minimum Gaps section), which will mean staves should be consistently positioned on each page, but notes and other items are likely to overlap onto other staves. You can also turn off collision avoidance for text objects, which might loosen the stress on vertical spacing, but you would have to position those text items manually in most cases.
  4. Use manual staff spacing to tweak particular staves - although this is unlikely to be a practical large-scale option for a large full score.

Dorico doesn’t “try” to keep staves at the same height on every page, as when the team researched published works they saw that historically there is a lot of flexibility in this arena - balancing fairly consistent positioning with the maximum possible staff size.

3

Thank you very much for your reply!

As I tried all of this already I think the conclusion is, to swap to another paper size, though in Germany it’s really annoying to get something between A4 and A3.

One suggestion: Turning off staff spacing collision would be a nice option, if you could turn it of for a single flow or even a single System Break. In my case it’s only around 6 pages, which need allignment, so I finally will try to move everything manually. (it has got a lot of texts, aligning those wouldn’t be less annoying.

Best regards,
MusiChronos