Skip to main content ↑ ↓
Topic: Changing Page Size (Read 2920 times) previous topic - next topic

Changing Page Size

Happy New Year to everyone,

I'm working on an SSAA choral piece that includes flute, percussion, and piano, so I'm not happy with how it's looking on the page  - with all those staves (eight), there's only one system that fits per page, so it's a 26 page monstrosity, which isn't really great for the choristers who have so many page turns. If the page size was a little bigger, I could fit two systems. How is this achieved in NWC? I don't see anywhere to change those parameters.

All the best,
SEBC

Re: Changing Page Size

Reply #1 –
What you can do:

(a) Make the margins a little smaller - maybe this tweaking is enough.

(b) Tweak the staff labels - it helped me sometimes to remove e.g. a dot after P. (piano) or the like.

(c) Change the page size: Install a separate - preferably PDF - printer (e.g. PDFCreator), go to its (advanced) settings and select "User-defined size", where you can define an arbitrary page size. You'll get then a PDF with that size; how you get this to real paper, is another problem (typically, you would either scale it down to "fit the page" - e.g. letter -, or print it on larger paper - e.g. A3 - and cut the paper down). If you use this PDF printer only for NWC, it doesn't interfere with the rest of your Windows (e.g. Office) use - otherwise, you have to switch the printer and page-size every time you use the printer.
If I do things like that, I write a documentation for myself into the "Comments" of the "File Info" (Ctrl-I), e.g. "For printing, use PDFCreator with a user-defined size of 200x400mm" ...

H.M.

Re: Changing Page Size

Reply #2 –
Hi Harald

Thanks for your reply. I was hoping you would see the question. I have my margins at .5 inches. and am using shortform names, so I tried out using the legal size option in PDFCreator, but I got the same result with just a huge amount of white space between the last staff and the copyright info at the bottom. I'm going to try taking out the instruments other than piano and see what happens.

I should mention that my font size is 16. To get two systems on a page, I need to go down to 12, which isn't practical.

Re: Changing Page Size

Reply #3 –
Have you tried unchecking "Justify printed systems vertically"? It's on the Options tab of the Page Setup dialogue box.

Re: Changing Page Size

Reply #4 –
The other thing you might mess around with would be margin settings on the top and bottom staves, and/or tightening the distance between staves - unless you already have. Remember, you can do this on a system-by-system basis.
 

Re: Changing Page Size

Reply #5 –
SEBC,

Some tricks that I am using sometimes to reduce pages per score are:

(1) There is a default option in the Page Setup\Options : "increase spacing for longer notes" which is checked by default. But it can explode the pages (unless there are many short notes in other "visible" staves). Unchecking that option can be beneficial.

(2) Also by playing with the upper and lower boundary for staves (in staff properties - visual) you can sometimes achieve more systems per page.

Bart

Re: Changing Page Size

Reply #6 –
Thank you, everyone, for chiming in. I decided to omit the flute and drum part, and just include the voice and piano parts for the choral version. This gives me two systems per page.

I checked with a choral prof at my university and he said that's quite normal, although the conductor will have the full score, and obviously the instruments will have part scores.