Following advice from other threads has confused me greatly. I have a work for Choir and piano where the first system is nicely presented on page 1 but every other page has two systems. All I want to do is make two systems to every page including first.
In Engrave mode, I used the comma advice which moved a bar from second system into first. I’ve adjusted vertical spacing and Rastral sizing but nothing moves.
If anyone has a way through this I would be very appreciative.
Make a Frame Break at bar 11.
Make a Frame Break at bar 1.
While the Frame Break at bar 1 is still selected, go to the Property Panel at the bottom and select “Wait for next Frame Break”.
Now watch closely at the bottom of the first page: if the fullness indicator has turned red and shows a percentage over 100, you have forced too much material onto that page for Dorico to layout it nicely.
There are a couple of possibilities you have to get the percentage to a 100 or below.
You could try:
Select the Frame Break signpost on page 2/bar 11.
Open the Property Panel at the bottom and activate “Space size”. It will show the actual Space size. Leave it, as it is.
Now go to the first Frame Break on the first page/bar 1.
Do exactly the same. This time, slightly decrease the Space size. F.e. if it showed “1.75”, change it to “1.7” - and have a look at the result.
And yes, as @Vadian describes, best is to give your layout a fresh start by doing a Reset Layout and adjusting the overall settings and options.
The comma keystroke moves a bar to the previous system, it doesn’t affect vertical spacing of systems.
Did you move systems manually? Or is this an XML import?
My suggestion is to reset the layout. Dorico does a pretty good job with the default settings.
In Engrave Mode select menu Engrave > Staff Spacing > Reset Layout and also Format Music Frames > Reset Layout . This removes the system and frame breaks as well as all manual system spacing.
Before changing the rastral size other parameters you could modify are Inter-system gap in Vertical Spacing and to reduce the top and bottom page margins slightly (10 mm/ 0.4 in are sufficient in most cases) in Page Setup.
The Property Panel is the panel at the bottom of your Dorico window.
It is quite an essential area for your engraving, as it is where you can do adjustments to everything you select in your score.
If not visible:
To open the Properties panel in Dorico, press Ctrl+8 (Windows) or Cmd+8 (Mac) while in Write or Engrave mode. You can also click the small arrow/icon in the bottom center of the screen
Okay. Found Properties, thank you. But when I try to select the first bar line, only the brackets are highlighted and no ‘Wait for next Frame Break’ appears anywhere. Should I select the whole bar? I’ll try it anyway.
I would say that for a work like this, you don’t need to add System Breaks on every system. Let Dorico do the work for you. Choose a Note Spacing value in Layout Options that fills most of the pages as you want; and then use a few Breaks where you want to make changes.
(Also, singers will sing the same staff line until directed otherwise. Losing the abbreviated staff labels will give you a bit more space on each system.)
Yes. The staff labels can be deleted - good point. As for the layout, I’m letting Dorico do as much as it can. Having been a Cubase user for 35 years, my workflow is very much based in the older ‘do it yourself’ version. Still using Cubase for my creations (I record most of my works) and transferring score data to Dorico for engraving/printing.
Very much on the learning curve. Some aspects are not as intuitive for me as yet.
