Matching stave settings between staves; how come they're different on same page?

• Feb 27, 2021 - 15:28

I'm still relatively new to MuseScore and am having difficulty achieving uniformity of spacing within the staves. In the attached piece of music (Psalm 69 NV) the staves on page 1 have what appears to me to be appropriate spacing, whereas those on page 2 have an incremental increase in the space below the lyrics, and by page three there is more free space than lyric.

Whichever system I select (shift-clicking) reports the same spacing, though I'm not sure whether or not that particular report (format / style / page) generates just one report per piece. How can I get things nicely uniform, please?


Comments

You'd need to share the score to demonstrate what you mean and possibly get shown the cure.
But probably you're seeing the effect of Format > Style > Page > Enable vertical spacing

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

Thank you Jo-jo; I'll try that again - Psalm 69 New Version L M.mscz

I'm still relatively new to MuseScore and am having difficulty achieving uniformity of spacing within the staves. In the attached piece of music (Psalm 69 NV) the staves on page 1 have what appears to me to be appropriate spacing, whereas those on page 2 have an incremental increase in the space below the lyrics, and by page three there is more free space than lyric.

Whichever system I select (shift-clicking) reports the same spacing, though I'm not sure whether or not that particular report (format / style / page) generates just one report per piece. How can I get things nicely uniform, please?

Attachment Size
Psalm 69 New Version L M.mscz 25.08 KB

In reply to by Ken Baddley

The thing is, uniform spacing isn't better - it just trades one potential issue for another. By disabling vertical justification, you have more similar spacing within systems, but now you have extremely uneven margins,. which is actually a rather worse problem. The defaults were better here. But, better still I think would be a slight tweak to the specifics, to prevent page three from spreading so much given it isn't going to fill the page anyhow. For instance, setting it back to enabling vertical justification but reducing the max staff distance to 14 or 15. Then the second page remains nicely filled out to the bottom of the page but the third page isn't spread so far.

Really, better still might be to consider changes to the staff size or other settings that would allow this to simply fit on two pages. You've already reduce the staff size some, but not enough to actually make a difference - even with the default staff size it's still three pages. So my vote might actually be to increase the staff size back up to standard and then add some more break to actually fill those three pages more completely. It's the half-full third page that seems awkward to me, I think most professional engravers would probably try to avoid that.

Also, the page and margins are inviting wide gaps here even when there are two systems on a page. I'd consider increasing the music top marign in Format / Style / Page to move the top system lower on the page, maybe also the bottom margin, thus decreasing the gap needed in the middle, while retaining the nicely aligned margins from page to page.

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