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Topic: A way to prevent system break? (Read 5204 times) previous topic - next topic

A way to prevent system break?

I know there's a way to force a system break on a bar line or boundary, but is there an easy way to prevent a bar line from breaking a system?

For small things, just adding tons of spacers of different sizes worked to tighten things up and fit more in a single system.  It worked for the solo cello part I just laid out, (movt 1, movt 2, movt 3), since only some systems needed to be spaced more tightly, but it doesn't really scale to be feasible for a big score.  The original score has a relatively large vertical scale, but is quite tight horizontally, so almost every page needs to have the space tightened up to avoid the new score either being in tiny print or being way too many pages, (the 118 pages in the original are plenty already).  If there was a way to just prevent a system break for a bar or two, that'd cover 90% of the cases easily, instead of having to insert and adjust thousands of spacers.  :))

Re: A way to prevent system break?

Reply #2 –
Quote from: Rick G. –
No. There isn't a hard way either.
:( Not even with the tools/objects API?  I'm grasping at straws, but it'd be a source of good motivation to finally dig into lua.  I guess the worst case would be that I'd have to make a tool that would try to predict the needed spacers to respace everything and generate spacers everywhere, but maybe there's something easier than that.

Re: A way to prevent system break?

Reply #3 –
The only ways to prevent a system break at a certain position:

  • reduce the printable size of the notation (from File, Page Setup)
  • remove extra space by placing reduction Spacers that reduce the note spacing
  • force a system break at a prior bar

So, for example, if you have:

Code: (nwc) [Select · Download]
!NoteWorthyComposerClip(2.751,Single)
|Note|Dur:Half|Pos:0
|Note|Dur:Half|Pos:0
|Bar
|Note|Dur:Half|Pos:0
|Note|Dur:Half|Pos:0
|Bar
!NoteWorthyComposerClip-End

This can often be greatly reduced by using spacers:

Code: (nwc) [Select · Download]
!NoteWorthyComposerClip(2.751,Single)
|Spacer|Width:10
|Note|Dur:Half|Pos:0
|Spacer|Width:10
|Note|Dur:Half|Pos:0
|Spacer|Width:10
|Bar
|Spacer|Width:10
|Note|Dur:Half|Pos:0
|Spacer|Width:10
|Note|Dur:Half|Pos:0
|Spacer|Width:10
|Bar
|Spacer|Width:10
!NoteWorthyComposerClip-End

Re: A way to prevent system break?

Reply #4 –
One item to consider (that you might already be using) is the setting "Increase spacing for longer notes", in Page Setup on the Options tab. This defaults to on (checked) for new scores. If you are not familiar with the setting, this page has a short description of what it does.

For the record, I have always thought it would be nice to have several spacing amounts available, versus the "all or nothing" that this setting currently provides.

Re: A way to prevent system break?

Reply #5 –
I concur with Mike's suggestion re the availability of several spacing options. NWC's spacing is quite open, compared to most older engraved scores I'm aware of. I like it - it's easy to read - but it would be nice to have the option to close it up somewhat without losing proportional spacing altogether.

Re: A way to prevent system break?

Reply #6 –
Thanks for the discussion, everyone!  :)

Yeah, having an option to adjust the overall horizontal spacing scale would be great.  It would also be useful for individual systems to have an option on barlines to possibly break system (default), force break system, or never break system; or alternatively, to have an option to force a system break without any break since the last forced system break.  If any one of those three were available, it'd be 10x less work than manually adding so many spacers in this case.

I'll start looking into making a tool to automatically add spacers of different sizes based on the surrounding content, though I'm quite busy right now, so I don't know when I'll get around to it.  Maybe I'll work on the layout for the individual orchestral parts first, since spacing doesn't need to be as tight overall for the separate parts as for the score.
 

Re: A way to prevent system break?

Reply #7 –
I would certainly  like to have the option of making slight adjustments to note spacing to allow easier control of page numbers in choral items.

Bill Denholm.

Re: A way to prevent system break?

Reply #8 –
What I've been using, are user tools which Rick provided some years ago.
These have been a great help to me, and it astonishes me that they have not been used extensively in the NWC community.

rg_ZapSpacers.php to remove spacers (by default from a whole staff, or from your selection).

Of the second tool, to place multiple spacers (again by default on a whole staff, or a selection),
I've mislaid the parent version,
but am attaching some of my copies, in which I've changed the parameter in the php coding.

With the samples available, it should be easy enough to  set up whatever other you may require.

With these tools, it is a breeze to install and/or remove spacers many times,
to try to achieve your goal.
Unfortunately, the goal isn't always achievable..........

Re: A way to prevent system break?

Reply #9 –
Something which also might help, is  to reduce  margins in
 File > page setup > margins > inside and/or outside edge.

Remember: In portrait layout, "Letter" is wider than "A4", which might just help.

Re: A way to prevent system break?

Reply #10 –
I guess it's been a bit over 5 months, but I finally finished manually laying out all of the orchestral parts for all 3 movements!  Yay!  :)  It took placing 11,069 spacers to lay out all 91 pages.

I don't know if the script above would have helped much with laying out the individual parts, but I still haven't laid out the orchestral score, and it will probably help there, for being more aggressive with the tightening of the spacing, so thanks to Haymo for posting it!  I might also try customizing it; there were a few decent heuristics I found when spacing the individual parts, so it might not be too difficult to make it dynamically choose spacer sizes based on context.  ;)

That said, it'd still be awesome to have some easier layout options in a future version of Noteworthy, even if it's just an option on bar lines in addition to "Force System Break (Top Staff Only)" like "Forbid System Break (Top Staff Only)", (or maybe a 3-option drop-down or radio button set named "Break System (Top Staff Only)": Default, Always, Never), that'd have saved tons of time.  If you'd like a beta tester, I'd be happy to do what I can to help!  :D

Edit: Chose more consistent names for the proposed 3 UI options in the parentheses in the last paragraph.