Making staves smaller

• Aug 1, 2011 - 19:07

This is probably an obvious fix, but I have yet to figure it out. I have written out a score for a marching band wind section, and I have 14 staves. So even on the biggest paper size for the score, the tuba part is at the VERY bottom, with almost no room for dynamic markings. Also, I am only getting anywhere from 4 to even 1 measure per page, depending on how busy the music is. That's a lot of page flipping. Is there a way to size down all the staves so I can put it all on letter size paper and get more music on each page? And if so, is there a way to do it without messing up the spacing between dynamic markings and everything? I've finally gotten it all looking nice, it's just too big.

Thanks.

Comments

• Aug 1, 2011 - 19:52

I should have mentioned, that was actually the first thing I tried. But I want all the staves to be smaller themselves. I have already used space to add more room to them for dynamic markings, but if I do it too much, it just pushes the lower staves off of the page. If I lower the space, it does make the staves smaller, but it still crams them all together and screws up the proportions of the all the text and dynamic markings.

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• Aug 1, 2011 - 20:01

Lowering the space value is exactly what you want. I suspect that what you saw when it crammed the staves closer together was the effect of the Page Fill Threshold parameter under Style->Edit General Style->Page. With the default "space" setting, you were probably filling up the page enough for this to kick in and stretch things out, adding extra space between the staves. When you reduced the "space" setting, you probably went below the Page Fill Threshold, and thus the staves were no longer stretched out to fill the page. I find it works best to set Page Fill Threshold to 100% - effectively turning off page fill - when playing around with any other settings. Otherwise, the results can be deceiving.

But in any case, text and dynamics *should* have resized themselves accordingly when you reduced the "space" setting. When you try again, if you find this is not the case, it would help to post a sample.

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• Aug 1, 2011 - 20:15

Thanks Marc. Well I tried putting the threshold at 100%, and it still crammed everything up toward the top of the page on Legal size paper. So I changed the paper size to letter, since that's what I have available to print on, and it ended up being the right page size, and the music itself fit on quite nicely. Now, I just have the issue of my crescendos/decrescendos being screwed up. I attached 3 pictures. The first one is how a page looked before resizing everything. The other two are results of shrinking it all. You can see the crescendos that go over page breaks got mutilated, and some of the other crescendos lengths didn't adjust. Is there any way to fix that without doing them one by one?

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• Aug 1, 2011 - 20:48

Sorry, I should have been more clear. It is *correct* that everything would be crammed together at the top of the page when Page Fill Threshold is set to 100%. The only reason they weren't being crammed together is that the page fill was kicking in. By setting the threshold to 100%, you can see your score as it really is - your staff and/or system distance parameters (same dialog) are set too low. So then you have a chance to fix those parameters. But if the page fill gives you the effect you want, there is no real need to do that It's OK to leave the page fill set lower.

Anyhow, there are indeed known bugs in MuseScore where certain symbols that cross page boundaries are drawn incorrectly. Unfortunately, I don't know a solution other than manually adjusting things one by one.

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