Hi all, I’m having a heck of a time trying to figure out the best method of setting the vertical spacing in this layout without resorting to manually tweaking everything.
You can see that the third, fourth, and fifth staves are much closer together than the first two (and I can hardly think of a situation where this would be acceptable!).
The help file indicates to muck about with the Ideal Gaps/Minimum gaps, but on a justified page the Ideal Gaps aren’t used. The only setting that seems to do anything is turning off the Automatically resolve collisions function, and that seems counterintuitive (more work, not less!).
Can anyone give advise as to which way to go? If I’m going to have to manually tweak everything, I’d rather know that ahead of time and just get to it, rather than having to redo work. Thanks!
Ideal gaps are certainly used on justified pages, to calculate how vertically full the page is, before justification.
In situations like these you can:
-Experiment with a smaller ideal inter-system gap
-experiment with a smaller minimum gap between systems
-uncheck avoid collisions in Layout Options>Bar Numbers, which might allow the dynamics to tuck closer to the staff.
I may have confused you - I find the small gaps in the 3rd-5th staves unacceptable. I would prefer the staves be in the 0.8" range, as in the first two staves.
The gaps between systems will only be smaller than the inter-system gap set in Layout Options > Vertical Spacing if you’ve forced too many systems onto the page (either with a set number of systems in Layout Options > Casting Off or with Make Into Frame/Frame Breaks that Wait for Next Frame Break).
I’d guess that unless your inter-system gap is substantially lower than the default, there’ll be a red indicator at the bottom left of the page in Engrave mode housing a vertical fullness value over 100%.
Try changing the Playback Template to Silent, as well as removing any music from any other instruments etc., as well as anything after bar 370 (after that page). Any luck?
If the page is 278% full, then there must be some forced system formatting in play, e.g. a frame break at the start of the frame with the Wait for next frame break property set. You can remove all system formatting to get back to a clean slate by choosing Engrave > Format Music Frames > Reset Layout.
For these kinds of vertically tight part layouts where you want to get a lot of systems onto the page and have them spaced evenly by default, I’d recommend deactivating Automatically resolve collisions between adjacent staves and systems on the Vertical Spacing page of Layout Options. Systems will then be positioned exactly at their default positions, at the expense of items protruding above and below the system being allowed to collide with each other. But you may well find that deciding how to solve those collisions on an individual basis by nudging items in Engrave mode is less laborious than adjusting the staff spacing.
So I went through the system breaks and found a bunch of them flagged to Wait for next frame break and I deselected that option but saw no improvement.
Deselecting “Wait for next frame” isn’t really the answer – you should start, as Daniel suggested, by doing Engrave > Format Music Frames > Reset Layout to get rid of all custom system formatting.
Using Library Manager, I can also see the differences in Layout Options between your settings and factory defaults. You’ve got very large inter-staff and inter-system gaps. When I reset those to defaults, now the vertical spacing looks reasonable.
And now I can see that you’ve actually got two staves per system, because in Setup mode you added a flute player and a piccolo player, and you’re displaying both in one part. In Dorico, the way to handle this is a single player with two instruments. You’ll see two separate staves in Galley view in Write mode, so that you can enter music in the right place, but in Page view (or Engrave mode), Dorico will take care of only showing you the single active system – and automatic instrument change labels!
Thanks - unfortunately, having the Piccolo player also holding Flute III messes up the score order, so I chose to use a layout with two staves as the lesser of two weasels.
I will experiment with Resetting the Layout and see if it solves my other issues.
I suspect @hautboisbaryton wants the score to reflect pitch order, so Piccolo above the flutes but then below them when switching to flute 3. The most straightforward solution is not to bother with that! There’s plenty of scores where the piccolo is written below the flutes. In a way this makes sense too, since it’s still the third player who will be on piccolo. It helps the conductor to know which stave corresponds to which physical person in the orchestra, no matter which instrument they’re holding.
