Adjust vertical space between systems and between staffs within a system

• Apr 20, 2010 - 19:11

It must be that people have ask this question before - perhaps someone could lead me to a good siscussion about it. I play in a band. In that environment, fewer page turns is always best! But MuseScore sets the spacing between systems and between staffs within a system very wide. I could put 2 - 3 times that much score on a page. I understand stretch is left and right on the page. But stretch is limited - especially if the lyrics are there also. Of greatest value to me would be vertical control of the systems and staffs within a system. I read some commentary about putting in greater verticle space by using dummy lyrics, created something lik a space on a line. That's kind of hoeky - and it goes the wrong way! Any help?


Comments

In reply to by peterein

Hard to say without an attached score. There is a min and a max setting, and depending on what's going on in your particular, you might need to change one or both to have the effect you want. In general, min will help control how many systems fit on a page, max will allow the systems that are on the page to expand to fill more of the page.

In reply to by David Bolton

The above are useful hints. I do hope though that someone who really understands all this will put definitions of all the Edit Style/Page parameters (Staff Upper Border, Staff Distance, etc.) into the manual. I can't find any information on these in the current one (0.9.4). Their meaning isn't at all obvious, and I find that fooling around with them leads to more confusion than clarification.

In reply to by Scrivener

You really should upgrade to at least the latest release version, 0.9.5, which has a lot of improvements over 0.9.4. I don't know what system you're on, but if you're willing to try a nightly, the 0.9.6 nightlies are very much improved over even 0.9.5, and are now quite stable (it's all I'm using now).

In reply to by Lauren429

It's difficult to say much from only a picture - we'd need to see the score itself in order to be of much help. Also, it isn't totally clear what you want to "fix" - do you want more or less space than currently? From the picture, I might *guess* you have some empty lyrics in verses 2 and higher and that is why there is extra space; deleting those empty lyrics would reduce the space. But without seeing the score, that's just a guess.

In reply to by Lauren429

Your score is very unusual in that you have lyrics but not the melody that they are sung to. Music isn't normally published that way, so MuseScore isn't necessarily optimized to produce that typoe of score, but still, it should work, and does.

There are a few things causing problems in your score. One if that you have apparently entered lyrics into all sorts of different verses. For instance, the lyric "to" in measure 32 is actually in verse 3. It seems you dragged it up to make it *look* like it is in verse one, but space is still allocated as if it were in verse 3.

I guess maybe you entered these lyrics into verses other than 1 to allow you to have mutliple words under a single note. but the better way to do that is to simply enter Cgrl+Space between the words. All lyrics should be in verse 1 unless you actually have multiple verses. Then they will automatically line up. You should virtually never need to drag lyrics around, even when creating the sort of non-standard "lyrics but no melody" type of score you have.

BTW, you have also apparently increased the "Lyric bottom margin" in Style / General / Page from the default of 4.0sp to 5.0sp.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Thanks for the reply. I tried pressing ctrl + space but it jumps straight to the next minim and doesn't allow me to have two words under the first minim.

How can you tell that the word 'to' is part of verse 3?

I might just have to notate the vocal melody to make things easier perhaps.

In reply to by Lauren429

You did enter "What you" and "want to" using Ctrl+Space, apparently, so that does work. Same for "Wait 'til you get home_""I am", "lonely too_" and many more.
Unless you're on a Mac, see https://musescore.org/en/handbook/lyrics#Special-characters (1.x handbook), there is it +Space
You can tell the verse number when select the syllable and hitting Ctrl+R, then it jumps back into the row it had been entered in.

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