Changing Horizontal Spacing in Layout View

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Changing Horizontal Spacing in Layout View

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Before you work on the details of laying out pages of a score part, you should choose the font size and overall horizontal spacing (percentage compression or expansion). This topic describes how to change the horizontal spacing. The previous topic describes how to change the font size.

By default, all music symbols and text share the same font size and style (such as Times New Roman). In Page Layout View, you can change the font size for all music symbols and text by simply clicking the Increase Font Size PageLayoutIncreaseFontSizeButton button or Decrease Font Size PageLayoutDecreaseFontSizeButton button.

You can specify different font sizes for different types of text. For example, the font size for notes and music symbols might be 9 points, but the font size for lyrics might be a larger 10 or 12 points. To assign different font sizes to different categories of text or symbols in Composer, follow the instructions in Font Size for Types of Text.

The procedure below describes how to change the default font size. The default font size applies to any category of text or music symbol which you have not specified using the Text Fonts command in the Format menu.

Note that the procedure for changing the horizontal spacing, using Page Layout commands, has exactly the same effect on horizontal spacing as using the horizontal spacing option with the Font Size and Spacing Command in the Format menu. The horizontal spacing option is provided redundantly in Page Layout View so that you can adjust the horizontal spacing and other aspects of page layout all in one place in Composer.

prcarrow To change the horizontal space:

1.Navigate to the Page Layout palette.

-- OR --

Type SHIFT+P. If this takes you to the Page Text Palette instead, type SHIFT+P a second time to go to the Page Layout Palette.

Composer will display the score in Page Layout View.

2.In the Page Layout Palette:
B816To increase the horizontal spacing in large  increments, click the PageLayoutIncreaseHorzSpacingLargeIncrementButton button, or type H + UpArrowKey.
B816To decrease the horizontal spacing in large  increments, click the PageLayoutDecreaseHorzSpacingLargeIncrementButton button, or type H + DownArrowKey.
B816To increase the horizontal spacing in small  increments, click the PageLayoutIncreaseHorzSpacingSmallIncrementButton button, or type H + RightArrowKey.
B816To decrease the horizontal spacing in small  increments, click the PageLayoutDecreaseHorzSpacingSmallIncrementButton button, or type H + LeftArrowKey.

prcarrow To find out what the current horizontal stretch percentage is:

B816Hold the mouse over any of the four horizontal spacing buttons.

Composer will report the horizontal stretch percentage in the button tip, as illustrated here:

LayoutPaletteHorzStretchTip

Note that you should not expect to be able to anticipate what change in the horizontal or vertical spacing value will be necessary to place more or fewer measures on any given page. For example, if there are 21 measures on a page at 100% spacing and you want to display 22 measures instead, it is difficult to predict whether 99% horizontal spacing will be necessary, or whether a smaller horizontal spacing percentage will be needed, such as 98% or 95% or 90%. You will need to try out different spacings, and see what happens. Also, changing the horizontal spacing percentage will affect the number of measures on each page differently, according to how much "slack" is currently distributed in any given page.

If you need to control exactly how many measures are on a given page, then you will need to use some combination of these Page Layout commands: System Break, Page Break, Keep Measure With Previous, and Keep System With Previous.