Note spacing
Music spacing is automatically applied when you enter music into PrintMusic. However, if you decide to turn off Automatic Music Spacing in the Edit menu, the spacing will be linear; in other words, a whole note gets exactly the same horizontal space as four quarter notes. Furthermore, this newly-entered music may contain collisions between lyric syllables, overlapping chord symbols, and crowded 32nd notes.
One of PrintMusic’s most important features is its Apply Music Spacing command. Once you’ve entered your music into the score, PrintMusic can apply a sophisticated system of width allotments to each note of your score. This feature is modeled on traditional professional music typesetting, where the engraver would consult a table of width measurements for each note value. The result is nonlinear spacing, where notes of different duration occupy only as much space as they need. The Apply Music Spacing command has the added benefit of neatly adding additional space to each measure, as necessary, to accommodate lyrics, chord symbols, and “notey” passages.
- Choose the Selection tool
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- Select the music you want to respace.
In general, you’ll want to choose Edit > Select All so that all staves are highlighted. If you select only one staff, for example, you could get unexpected results, because the respacing command sets the measure widths for all staves according to the spacing of the selected region. Thus, if you select and respace measure 1 in the flute staff, which contains only a whole note, the running eighth notes in another staff’s measure 1 will be compressed and overlapping.
- Choose Utilities > Apply Music Spacing.
The Apply Music Spacing command is responsible for laying out the notes within each measure. In doing so, PrintMusic adjusts the widths of the selected measures, and they may no longer fit neatly into one line of music across the page.
