How to space the music score evenly

• Sep 7, 2016 - 23:43

I have finished my piece and on the last page I want to stretch the music out so music covers the whole page and is spaced to match the previous page. How can I do this.

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score layout.PNG 102.18 KB

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• Sep 8, 2016 - 01:03

Page makeup is an art, and in music publishing it is a particularly difficult one. MuseScore does a reasonable job of automatically laying out systems on each page, but it is a computer program, not a graphic designer. Unless you are lucky enough to have exactly enough music to fill x pages evenly when using the default parameters (or the settings you have chosen), you will have to make manual adjustments starting at the beginning of your score.

If you want your last page to look like all the other pages--not necessarily the best way to approach things, by the way--you will need to start at the beginning of your score and either squeeze or spread out the music so that you wind up with an equal number of systems per page. You can spread out music by adding Stretch (select a section, and type { a number of times); you can squeeze the music by reducing Stretch (select a section, and type } a number of times). You can also add hard line breaks from the F9 Breaks & Spacers palette, which will force the systems to break where you want them to do so.

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• Sep 8, 2016 - 17:59

See Style / General / Page, the Min and Max system distance settings. MuseScore will make sure there is at least as much space as the Min and will squeeze as many staves onto a page as it can given that constraint, but then will automatically stretch them up to the Max value. This allows pages to look equally full (in terms of the bottom margin) even if they have differing numbers of systems. It isn't clear from your posted pcture (attaching the actual score is almost always more helpful), but most likely you would want to play with these two settings. Setting to be equal to each other will give you literally the same spacing on all pages, but if there are differing numbers of systems on different pages, or a title frame on one page, or lyrics that are not the same on all systems, or spacers anywhere, then this will of course result in different bottom margins. So you will have to decide for yourself whether you want to prioritize having the same bottom margin or the same system distance.

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• Sep 8, 2016 - 18:05

It looks from that image like you're using an very old and outdated version of MuseScore. I suggest you download the latest version from this site and try the suggestions then.

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• Sep 8, 2016 - 18:43

Interesting, I hadn't noticed any of that. But now that you mention it, the very question being asked in this thread also suggests the example was created in a very old version (pre-2.0). Notice how the first page has system spacing that is wider than the second, even though the second apparently has fewer systems? This would not mormally happen in current versions of MuseScore - if the first page was spaced out that far, then the second page could be too. But older versions of MuseScore didn't have the concept of min/max spacing; the page fill was all-or-nothing. So either a page was full enough for the stretch to kick in (thus stretching out the music out to the bottom margin), or it wasn't (in which case you got the completely unstretch result we see in the picture).

So yeah, I think you called it :-). This is actually a very good demonstration case for why this change was made, to address problems like this. The current system not only does better out of the box but also provides more control. So, definitely first step is to update.

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