Turn off horizontal justification throughout

I’ve recently had many opportunities to use Dorico to typeset various things, and always enjoy the fact that things just look perfect straight away.

One thing I found I had to do manually was stretch spacing after the final note in each system, in order to achieve the below spacing. Is there any way to automatically turn off justification for the whole flow - rather than just the last system? I don’t really mind whether or not the stave lines continue to the end.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

You could have each line as a separate flow, in which case the “final system justification” would apply to all - although that would mean the staff lines would stop immediately after the final note.

You could set the dashed barline length to Zero, to create an invisible barline, and add a bar at the end of each line. (Remove the rest.)

Thanks, both.

I considered the separate flows, but that doesn’t work for me, as I’m producing two versions/layouts - one with accompaniment and one without. The line breaks don’t necessarily tie up between the two.

Ben, what’s the benefit of adding an empty bar at the end of each line, over what I’m currently doing, which is increasing the horizontal spacing after the last note?

Ah: No benefit at all: in fact changing the Note Spacing of the final note is probably the best way.

I wasn’t sure you’d actually achieved the result in the image in Dorico. …!

What about using several frames within a single frame chain? Therefore you could easily adjust the width of each one. It’s not ideal, and as manual as your current method, but it’s flexible and maybe it’s another way of accomplishing the same that could yield a good result in your case.

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I was able to achieve the desired result using different time signatures:

  1. Create document with single staff
  2. Start with a time signature of say 17/4
  3. Create 7 measures
  4. Create system breaks after each bar
  5. Enter music and words for line 1
  6. The rests that will be left should not necessarily be ‘removed’ as this will affect the spacing - Rather, set their opacity to 0 to hide them.
  7. Hide the time signature.
  8. You can affect the spacing by adding more beats into the time signature of each line and then hiding the additional rests using opacity.
  9. If you need a different time signature on each line, then create one, hide it and use the CODA trick to get rid of the cautionary time signature at the end of the previous line - outlined by Dan Kreider here: How to hide cautionary key/time signatures in Dorico - YouTube

This method does not involve any manual horizontal note spacing editing. Hopefully this will work for you.

I find myself with a similar problem as the OP.

I need to turn off justification for selected lines so that the notes end up more on the left side. Client wants the end of these staves to be have some empty space as in the example from @dan_kreider.

Wondering if anyone has come up with a better solution than the one offered by @Grainger2001 (which works fine, but is rather time-consuming).

You can use the approach outlined by Lillie in her initial reply in this thread, i.e. use a separate flow for each line.

I would add the extra space by inputting a whole note (or two, maybe) at the end of each line then using Hide notehead and Suppress playback (both in Properties - Hide notehead is only available when in Engrave mode).
This is the same concept as point 8 in @Grainger2001’s post.

Edit: I’m assuming that each line is one bar of open time signature (with the time signature hidden) and there is a system break at the barline.

@StevenJones01 Your solution still seems to work best in my case. The separate flow idea / turning off the justification on final system tends to cram all of the notes too close together, and tweaking the note spacing rules to correct this just makes the rest of the systems look bad. Thanks

The solution I used was to manually drag the endpoint of each system in Engrave / Horizontal layout mode. I didn’t know these handles existed but they worked for me.