Best way to fill entire page with varying system sizes throughout score?

• Mar 1, 2020 - 09:56

Due to the varying occurrences of instruments per section, etc. I've got some pages which are nearly half empty, other's a quarter, etc (refer to navigator in attached screenies).. a lot of white space. Is there a way to adjust page size on a page-by-page basis, or an auto-fill type setting? Or is there another way to fill the white space or condense the score?


Comments

If I understand, you want to have always the same number of staves , on each page, with seeing empty staves when they are empty........if is that, you must "un-select" the "HIDE EMPTY STAVES" in the STYLE---GENERAL

In reply to by Raymond Wicquart

Negative. In other words, I've just hid all the empty staves to reflect how it was originally published in the score I'm transcribing (had I not hid them I'd have 34 staves on every page). Now, presumably because each system is a different size from movement to movement (section to section), many of my pages are just over half full (like it can't fit two systems on those pages), while many others are nearly full (i.e. couldn't fit a second system even if I changed the paper size to get the former cases to be less than half), and then I kind of have everything else in between.

Merely adding space to fill the page would create extremely awkward spacing in many of those cases it seems. The more professional solution is to include some staves even though they are empty, and/or to increase space only to a certain extent and accept some amount of "raggedness" in the bottom margins. Eventually we may come up with a way to automate this, but it's pretty subjective. So for now at least, you will need to do this manually if you desire that particular effect. Personally I find it preferable to not use "Hide empty staves" in cases like this where there is likely to still be only system per page anyhow - it just makes the score harder to read when instruments keep changing position from page to page.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Okay thank you. I do have it so that the order of instrument staves are consistent from page to page. Staves are generally only hidden (i.e. change order) when they're not used at all in a given movement (so in other words the order may only change section to section). This is how it was originally published. Now when you describe increasing space as possible solution, exactly what do you mean? I know in 2.3.2 on my XP partition I could Shift + click a staff and drag it to increase space between any given staves, but I haven't discovered how to do that in 3.4 on OSX.

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

Ok thanks Jojo. But regarding the particular issue at hand, wouldn't that change the spacing in the systems of the other sections as well (which have more or less staves depending which are needed in that movement), and thus essentially just be creating a different spacing issue somewhere else? Or is it possible to adjust spacing between two particular staves on a section-by-section basis?

In reply to by DesignLov3

In MuseScore 2, Shift+drag adjusted spacing score-wide, so I guess you mean each movement is a separate score? If so, you can use Staff Properties / Extra distance to do that in MuseScore 3, but if the goal is to do this consistently, I'd just use Format / Style / Page / Staff distance.

If on the other hand you are doing this for some pages but not others within a single score, you need Spacers from the palette.

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