I would like to use Layout Options > Vertical Spacing > Vertical Justification more often, but it seems that Dorico’s justification means equal spacings of the top staff line of one system to the top staff line of the next system, regardless of elements residing above or below the staff lines such as chord symbols or lyrics. Often, I have some systems with 1 line (verse) of lyrics and other systems with many more. Dorico’s justification leaves empty space in the systems that have fewer lines of lyrics. This looks bad and can result in additional pages. Is there an option to justify distances from the bottom element of one system to the top element of the next system? Dorico 6.1.10
if I understand correctly you are speaking of Inter-system gaps, which you can customise, depending on your needs. (but if would be better to see the actual project to better understand your situation).
Also, the Collision Avoidance should take care of the material between the staves.
And the Vertical Justification thresholds (the ones that have 60% and 80% as default), should be used in conjunction with the visualised Music Frame fullness (to achieve the desired results faster), in Engrave mode (on the bottom left of each page).
Can you provide a Dorico project example (uploading it here) where you are not quite having the results you wish (describing what you want to achieve)? So we can give suggestions based on the contest of your particular situation.
Thank you, @Christian_R. A demo project is attached. It is using Vertical Justification (threshold set to 10%). You see the very tall empty space under the first system, almost as tall under the second system, and a comfortable but much tighter space under the third system. I think that “justified” should make all of those three empty spaces between systems about equal.
But after further experimentation I retract my statement that this can result in additional pages. If I reduce the rastral from size 3 to size 6, then the layout fits on one page, and the top two systems are given less space, so that the empty spaces between systems are about equal, which looks nice
So my revised complaint is that Dorico’s justification seems to prefer to equalize the distances between the staff lines of adjacent systems, and only instead equalizes the empty spaces between systems, which is what I prefer, if doing so will result in less pages.
I suppose this might be a personal preference, but I don’t like those unequal empty spaces.
?? The Justification percentages are set to 60% and 80% in this document.
The simplest fix is just to use a Frame Break to fix everything into one page. I’ll agree that Dorico’s default Staff Size of 3 is too big for most things.
But yes: you’ll have to make some manual adjustments.
In my experience, singers get confused by more than 3 lines of verses beneath each other, and will struggle to find the correct line when there are more!
Yes, I forgot I probably did a “Reset to factory” after changin the threshold to 10%. Doesn’t matter though.
Regarding more than 3 verses, it is quite common. I’ve seen and engraved scores with up to 14. Standard practice is to put verse numbers on each line if there are more than 3 verses. Both Finale and Dorico support such verse numbers (in wildly different ways, as usual ).
So the solution is: yes: you’ll have to make some manual adjustments.
I then saw that you changed the First page template to shrink the music frame…(I keep searching for optimal global options that don’t need this change):
so, restoring the normal size of the Forst page template’s Music Frame, and with all other settings as above explained, you can set this threshold values, to have this result :
Yes, I’ve reproduced most of your steps now, @Christian_R and in my second post I agreed that this issue does not result in increased pages; it’s just that if there is extra space, that is, if the page is not full, the empty space is not distributed equally between the systems. The systems with less lyrics get more empty space.
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