Page layout: evenly distribute staves
Is there any way I can change the layout of the score such that all pages are 100% filled. Meaning that the score does not end with an odd stave or two in the last page. Is it possible to change the general settings or page layout so that the score is evenly distributed among the pages?
Thanks!
Comments
Currently only possible by adding page(/line) breaks yourself.
In many situations it doesn't really work out that way, because page breaks have to be put at positions that make sense musically. Usually that means at a position where your performer will have the time to turn the page.
In reply to Currently only possible by… by jeetee
Miss Fluid has hands, no? (just kidding)
Use the Atyle->General... -> Page and play with the min and max system distances. You can also use line and page breaks to change the number of systems on a page.
As I understand it, no, at present there is no "justified" layout option; I think it would be a very desirable function, and this is my understanding of the current situation. No doubt if I have misunderstood anything, it will be pointed out. I cannot find anywhere in the handbook that gives an overview of the strategies available for controlling horizontal spacing.
The good news is that within a line (i.e. one row of the score) MS does an excellent job of spacing everything evenly (i.e. "justification within a line"). But over the whole score it uses a "greedy" algorithm; fitting as much into each line as the current settings allow, and at the end leaving possibly a part line in a part page. This can only be sorted out manually.
The two basic values that control spacing are:
* Style / General / Bar (Measure) / Spacing (1=tight)
* Layout / "Stretch" setting (Increase, Decrease, and Reset)
Although the handbook seems to say that you can also access the stretch value ("more precisely") through the properties of a selected bar or bars, as far as I can see this only affects one bar at a time. The Layout menu controls go in steps of 0.1; with the Style /.../Spacing set to 1.1, reducing the Stretch from 1.0 to 0.9 makes the score shrink. but further reduction makes no difference. Possibly the "Spacing" value is multiplied by "Stretch", and 1 is the minimum value.
Well, anyway, for a 3 or 4 page score, jiggling the stretch will usually find a setting which more or less fills the pages, with manual touchup, but I have a 17-page score, at 3 systems (s) per page (p). Page 15 is filled with a repeated section, which I want to keep on one page; the first 14 pages are 13p2s (13 full pages + 2 systems). "Increase stretch" changes this to 15p1s, and reduce stretch has no effect. So it seems that from here on, it's just manual slog.
Something else I have found to be troublesome is that it is very (too) easy to adjust stretch here and there, and later forget to reset it all before starting again. This means that odd bars may be subtly more squashed than others, in a way which is not obvious at first glance, but really annoying when you notice it after printing.
In reply to As I understand it, no, at… by Imaginatorium
You are correct about much here, but a couple of points of clarification are in order:
Multiple applications of the "increase/decrease stretch" command in the Layout menu are not ineffective. It will keep decreasing in 0.1 increments down to the minimum value of 0.1. It might look like there is no effect if reducing stretch is not able to fit more measure on the line, but you can verify via Measure Properties that it does work.
While stretch commands are great for adjusting the number of measures per line, that wouldn't be my go-to method of adjusting number of systems per page. I would first get the measure per line looking the way you like via stretch (or the global Style / General / Measure / Spacing setting). Then start worrying about systems per page if desired. And to achieve that, I'd be playing with the min system distance in Style / General / Page, or simply adding manual page breaks - really, the far more desirable approach if you cvan spare the extra minute or so per score it takes. That way you have control over where the page breaks occur and can avoid putting them in the middle of long complex sixteenth-note passages, etc.
In reply to You are correct about much… by Marc Sabatella
Thanks for your comments. As you reminded me recently, one problem is that across the huge range of "music", there are many different sets of assumptions about what is "normal" in each genre. In this case (the 2-piano reduction I alluded to), I have about 20 pages of score, and being an orchestral reduction there are no big breaks in either part. So there are three systems per page, fixed. One more than three is four, which won't fit; one less is two, which just leaves a one-system gap. And 20 pages means 60 line breaks, which takes a lot more than a minute! (And as a matter of fact the other format I'm currently engaged with is SATB a capella, which is also a fixed 3 systems per page. So it cannot be exactly uncommon.)
In principle a "justify-paginate" function would not be particularly difficult to implement, since the system should be able to provide a "default length" for each bar; it is then a question of adding these default lengths, dividing, and calculating the closest to even break for each line. Then it would be necessary to go through and adjust awkward breaks manually. Perhaps this could even be implemented as a plugin. Where would I find the specifications on how to write a plugin?
About your first point: I take your word for it that the "stretch" value gets adjusted, even if it makes no difference to the apearance of the score. But I was really speaking about something slightly different. If stretch=1.1 gives 14p1s, and 1.2 gives 16p2s, then setting to 1.12 might just give the right result. As far as I could determine, it is possible to select a bar, and set the "stretch" to such a value, but when I tried to select a large part of the score and set this value (right-click or similar, sorry I can't remember), it only seemed to apply the value to a single bar. At that point I gave up.
In reply to Thanks for your comments. As… by Imaginatorium
The documentation for plugins, such as it is, can be found within the Help section of the Plugin Creator itself. Also by asking questions on the Plugins forum.
It is true that adjust stretch can only be done one measure at a time if using the measure properties dialog. So I would say if you are trying to set a single precise value for the whole score, stretch isn't the right answer - instead, change the default to which stretch is applied. Go to Style / General / Measure and play with the Spacing setting.