Tip #42 - A few tips for sqeezing more staves on a page

Recently a MusEdit user was trying to fit 16 staves on a single page without having to reduce the printout size, if possible. I realized there are several possibilities which might help accomplish this, and some of them aren't immediately obvious...

One of the more obvious choices is to reduce the margins to the bare minimum, which is restricted to no less than 1/4 inch (about 6 mm) at top, bottom, left and right. Go to File|Print Options to set the margins for an individual score, or use File|Set Preferences to set the default margins for all new scores.

Another possibility is that if you have any blank text lines which are being used merely to create spaces between staff lines or groups of staves you could reduce the size of the font for these lines. As you have probably already discovered, in MusEdit the font of a whole line is set by putting the caret anywhere within the line and hitting Ctrl+F. To reduce the font of a number of lines at once you can simply select them all (by hitting Ctrl+Shift while hitting the Down Arrow key) even if there are intervening staff lines -since they will be ignored when you are setting fonts- (but make sure the last line containing the caret is a text line so the option to set the font will be enabled) and then hit Ctrl+F and choose a smaller font size.

Also, when you create a new line group there is a check box for "insert a blank line at bottom of the group" so that each group of lines is separated by a space. If you're just barely fitting a whole group on one page you won't need this extra space at the bottom, so you can uncheck it to save a little bit of space.

Another thing you can adjust is the spacing between lines... This preference is on the File|Set Preferences|...View Options... page under Vertical Line Spacing. The default is set to 4, but you can set this value to as low as 1 pixel if you wish.

And of course, you can reduce the printout size... Perhaps if you try the suggestions above you will be able to keep the staves as large as possible while still fitting them on one page.

Finally, be sure to use Print Preview (Ctrl+Alt+V) to check whether your efforts have succeeded before actually printing things out, and it will probably help to show page breaks ( View|Show Page Breaks - Ctrl+Alt+G ) too. I do have to caution however, that when you are getting down to a millimeter or two difference between fitting things on one page or two the page breaks and even print preview might not have the accuracy to guarantee that what you see is what you'll get. (MusEdit's Print Preview is certainly more accurate than the one on mighty Microsoft's WordPad however!)

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