Compressed systems in parts for aleatoric score

Hey everyone,

I’m working on a score that’s largely aleatoric, and I’m using manually placed barlines in the score and lots of lines and brackets. I figured the parts would need a lot of manual adjustment, but I’m running into an issue where some of the measures in the parts compress down and only fill part of the system (photos attached of score and one of the parts). The problem seems to be mostly in measures where I manually removed rests. Is there any way to fix this?

I know there’s lots of properties that need to be propagated into the parts as well–just worried about the compressed measures for now.

Thanks!


Hi tpalmer and welcome to the forum!

The reason those bars are compressing is that you removed rests from those bars (I’m guessing to hide the bar rests under the lines?) With nothing “existing” in the bar, Dorico has nothing to use for spacing, so the bars end up shrunken.

If you select the last note in those parts before the empty bars, there should be a property in the Properties panel at the bottom of the window called “Ends voice” - if you deactivate that, the bar rests should come back and the bars should be spaced.

Depending on what you want to achieve in the end, there is an option to hide bar rests in empty bars automatically, which doesn’t result in them shrinking like that - see the instructions here.

Great–thanks so much! That worked!