User manual

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Designing your score: additional techniques
Auto Layout
This item on the Scores menu brings up a dialog with sev-
eral options. Activating one of these makes the program
“walk through” the score and make adjustments to mea-
sure widths, staff distances etc. automatically. Exactly
which parts and properties of the score are affected de-
pends on which option you activate/deactivate.
Ö You can also open the Auto Layout dialog by clicking
the Auto Layout button on the extended toolbar.
Move bars
This option looks at the currently active grand staff, and
attempts to adjust the measure widths, so that all notes
and symbols get as much room as possible. The number
of bars on the staff is not affected.
• You can perform this function for several staves in one
go, by dragging a selection rectangle over their left edges,
and then selecting Move Bars.
Move Staves
This changes the measure width (as with Move Bars) but
also the vertical staff distance, of the active staff and all
following staves.
Spread Page
This corrects the vertical layout of the staves on the cur-
rent page, so that they “fit onto the page”. In other words,
this removes white space at the bottom of the page.
Hide Empty Staves
This hides all empty staves, from the active staff to the end
of the score. Note that polyphonic/split staves are in this
case treated as one entity, if the clef in the upper system
differs from that in the lower system. That is, a piano staff
is considered “empty” only if there are no notes on either
staff.
• If you have activated the “Hidden” option on the Filter
Bar, hidden staves are indicated by a marker with the text
“Hide:Name” (where “Name” is the staff name).
To display hidden staves, delete their “Hide” markers.
• If you activate the option “Auto Layout: Don’t hide first
staff” in the Preferences dialog (Scores-Editing page),
staves in the very first grand staff will not be hidden, even
if they are empty.
This is useful for example if you are creating an orchestra score, and want
to show the complete “layout” of the orchestra on the first page of the
score, without hiding anything.
All Pages
Activate this if you want to apply the options above to all
pages. Please note that this setting will be applied to the
active staff and onwards. If you want all pages in the score
to be affected, you have to make the very first staff (the
first staff on the first page) the active staff.
Move Bars and Staves
This is a combination of “Move Bars”, “Move Staves”, and
“All Pages”, plus automatic calculation of the number of
bars across the page – the function tries to optimize the
number of bars across the page for each staff (with the
maximum number of bars as set in the dialog).
!
The automatic layout adjustments are done just as if
you yourself had made them manually. This means
that if there’s something you don’t like, you can al-
ways change it manually, as described above.