I’m having a teach-a-man-to fish moment. I’ve watched the wonderful Dorico engrave mode and page layout hour sessions, I know I can fix this eventually. But what I’m curious is why did it happen? One page is a mess. The preceding pages, and the following, are fine.
I had just switched over from full score, and created a new layout for piano and voices. And Dorico did this, as you see on page 30 (the middle page). Why did this happen? So that I can avoid it, or fix it with the immediate appropriate solution, instead of fishing around, trial and error, for the best fix of multiple options.
Basically, the combination of dynamics, lyrics and low notes with slurs has made the systems much taller than expected on this page, throwing off the rough estimate which forms the start of the casting-off algorithm. Save from adjusting global settings like the rastral size, a manual frame break should suffice to fix it. Or maybe you can fiddle with the casting off so that these tall systems are spread across two pages instead? Two systems on a page would look a bit odd and empty.
@TonH this happens even without any fixed number of systems per page. The overfull % is a symptom, not a cause.
Agree with the others, but in this case you might try moving the last bar onto the next page (that will take the Rehearsal Mark with it, and free up some vertical space - though perhaps insufficient)
Thanks to both of you. @TonH yes, I see that it is over full, but I have no idea what that means. Aside from, it being “overfull”. It doesn’t have much more music/information it than the other pages.
So I didn’t do some thing “wrong” per se. And there isn’t one correct way to fix, out of the many options? Thanks guys, I guess it is just the extra dynamics, rehearsal mark, some text, and low notes. I guess my eye-estimation was off. It looked the same as the other pages.
Yes, Janus thanks, I’ll just bump that bar with rehearsal space over.
I pushed the bar with rehearsal mark to the next page, and deleted (for the sake of learning) the “poco pp” dynamic above soprano at measure 47. And then everything fell into place.
So just to ingrain the lesson: A mess like that is always a product of an overload in the vertical spacing realm?
Do linked grouped dynamics take up more invisible space, at least to Dorico’s brain, than a bunch of independently placed dynamics?
You didn’t do anything wrong; you just hit an edge case where several factors occurred that made staves more widely spaced on this page than usual, and including recursive routines in the program to handle these edge cases automatically would have made the program so slow as to be a burden in almost every case.
If you go to the post I linked, underneath it is a list of every time someone’s linked to it in another thread. It’s quite enlightening to go through a few of them, look at the screenshots provided and spot what has been pushing the staves apart in each case.
It means that when Dorico tries to layout the music on this page, according to the vertical gap settings in your Layout Options, it needs more vertical space than there is.
As has been said: if you’ve got more low-hanging notes and lyrics, dynamics between them, and other stuff (like rehearsal marks), then this can happen.
In an idea world, Dorico would think "there’s too much stuff, so I’ll put one of the those systems on the next page. You can achieve that easily yourself with a Frame Break. Or, as said, maybe you can fit more stuff by reducing the number of bars on those systems, so that stuff doesn’t align in the worst way.
It means that Dorico is not able to simultaneously fulfill all of the set parameters for that page – margins, space size, minimum gaps, etc. – and had to squeeze a bit to fit everything in. The further the frame fullness goes above 100%, the more likely it is that the results will be unsatisfactory.
In a sense, yes: a grouped set of dynamics behaves similar to a line of lyrics, it cannot move closer to the staff than where the notes stick out the most. But in your specific case there’s not much you can win by ungrouping them, as most of the issues are with low notes, and the lyrics already ‘take care of’ causing problems there.
That’s an excellent example, to see clearly how one line of music could slowly build up alot of vertical information and cause a ruckus in the layout. You should pass that to Daniel for the next printing of the manual. Thanks again guys.
