Tip: Postpone Doing Page Layout

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Tip: Postpone Doing Page Layout

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It is a good idea to postpone work on page layout until you have completed all other tasks:

B816compose or arrange the notes of the song
B816add lyrics
B816add annotations such as accent marks, dynamic marks, and phrase marks

After your are done writing and editing the music, then:

B816set up the page size, orientation, and margins for the various parts
B816set the overall font size, and perhaps also font sizes for different types of text
B816set the horizontal spacing (percentage compression or expansion)
B816add the page title and headers or footers

After you have completed all of the above tasks, and are fairly certain that you will not change the work, only then should you then work on the page layout: adding page and system breaks, rearranging measures of systems, changing the vertical spacing of staves and systems, etc. If you start working prematurely on the page layout, you may have to discard some of your page layout effort. For example, if you add some introduction measures at the beginning of the music, then this might disrupt the pagination of the entire score.

Nevertheless, Musician's page layout mechanism can be forgiving about how changes you make to the music might impact pagination. Try using the Keep Measure With Previous and Keep System With Previous options, instead of "hard" system and page breaks.