Automatic Spacing of staves in relation to pages
I've noticed in many professionally published works that there's a filling out of the pages, a resizing of the stave spacing--and not only this but also the actual stave sizes--in order to fill out the size of the page margins. For instance, if a 5-paged work usually had 6 staves per page, the final page, or even the last two pages might have only 5 or 4 staves per page spaced in such a way as to "vertically justify"--fill up the pages--and remove excess space.
This can be done with the current options available with spacers, or under certain circumstances one can split a Musescore file and turn it into two so that there be different page settings regarding staff-spacings, but it would be very useful to have an automatic implementation of this somehow. Is there any potential implementation of such a feature in the future? This especially is relevant since it is a quality of professionally engraved music. I suppose it would require an option like are you wanting to just increase the space of the spacing between staves or do you want to resize the staves as well? At any rate, it seems worth implementing.
Comments
Use system breaks, page breaks and minimum and maximum system distance
Maybe my eyes were deceiving me: some scores felt like there was a variable distance on grand staves to accommodate the page; but you're right, with no grand-staff distance variation the min/max system distance does the trick, though it would be cool to have a "fill page" option to compute the min/max system distance values.
In reply to Maybe my eyes were deceiving by worldwideweary
Yeah, maybe you should ask for that feature for the next update.
In reply to Maybe my eyes were deceiving by worldwideweary
The reason (my guess only) why there is no fill page option is that in cases where you have only two systems on the last page it looks better when they are at the standard distance (max distance in this case) rather than at the bottom and the top with a huge gap in between. The same is true for three systems if there are only two staves per system.
In reply to The reason (my guess only) by azumbrunn
You're right that it looks better; it seems to me that this's why the "ideal" fill-algorithm would borrow staves from however far back it needed in order to create the proper "mean" space. At any rate, this stuff can be done manually and unfortunately with extra effort in many cases.
In reply to You're right that it looks by worldwideweary
It is quite difficult to borrow staves/systems from earlier pages. You can "borrow" no less than a whole system. This becomes even more of a problem with larger systems (say 4 staves, typically 3 system per page). You will end up with one or two systems on the last page 2 out of 3 times.
I have found after playing around with the parameters that there are parameters that need no adjustment at the end in practically every case (including single staff systems). Though after that you want the page turns in the appropriate locations (especially for parts) and you start adjusting manually anyway.
All of this does not fix a related problem: Most of the time the music is stretched far too much on the last system and you need to manually equalize. But I don't think it will be easy to automate that.
BTW these difficulties should make us appreciate the skill of the engravers of old who were able to get the page turns correctly and also have the stretch (as Musescore calls this) pretty equal from top to bottom! I can't begin to imagine how they did it.
In reply to Maybe my eyes were deceiving by worldwideweary
If you are sure you want even two systems to fill the page, then just set the max distance to some crazy big number like 1000sp. The min distance has nothing to do with fill; it controls how many systems will fit on the page. Unless you want to allow more than the default, just leave it alone.