Igor Engraver Manual

CHAPTER 10
More About Music Input and Editing
184
If you prefer this way of working, you should wait with the bars/system spacing
until the whole piece has been input into Igor Engraver so you can see how to
adjust your music from the start of the piece to the end.
A second way to work with fixed number of bars per system is using the Layout
settings checkbox Fixed no. of bars/system in the Bar grouping pane. This way,
Igor Engraver will always use the same number of bars per system whatever you
do – even if you insert or delete bars Igor Engraver will always keep the number
of bars per system constant.
There is a very clever use for this feature: staff paper can be produced in just a few
seconds using the Start bars/system pattern… command! First, create a layout
with the desired instruments. Next, choose Start bars/system pattern… and set
the number to 1. This way every system contains only one bar, so you will not
have any barlines in the middle of the systems. (Alternatively, set the number to
three or four if you want three or four bars per system.) To hide the semi-breve/
whole note rests, enclose them using click-drag and choose Hide semi-breves
from the contextual menu. If you want to, you can hide the rightmost barlines as
well and other objects on the page too.
Forcing Reflow of Bars
When you are working on a piece, you may find that the spacing of one or several
bars does not look as good as you would expect. This is because Igor Engraver
lets you work to some extent without recalculating the spacing of bars all the
time, thus saving processing time. The command Force reflow now overrides this
function and may produce even better spacing results.
To Speed Things Up
There are two things related to system breaks that may speed Igor Engraver up
(if you do not have any speed-related problems when running Igor, you can
ignore these tips):
• Use manual breaks in long pieces. Since manual breaks are very definite, they
cut down the number of bars that Igor Engraver has to process. Moving bars
from system to system takes time and a manual system break prevents bars
from being moved beyond that system.
• Disable automatic bars/system reflow: This means that you will have to manually
respace the music or enable the reflow again when a system gets too
crowded or when your piece is completed.