<< Click to Display Table of Contents >> Navigation:  Editing Staves and Formatting Parts > Laying out Pages of a Part > Moving Barlines Within a System

In general, Musician does a good job of horizontally spacing measures, and systems with measures, to evenly distribute space according to standard music engraving practices. There may be reasons, however, that you will want to override Musician's default horizontal spacing.

You can move a barline within a system to add more horizontal spacing to the measure on one side, and less horizontal spacing on the other side. For example, if one measure is too horizontally crowded, compared to other measures on the same system, you can move its left barline to the left, or its right barline to the right. This may, in turn, crowd the adjacent measure. So you may need to move the opposite barline of the adjacent measure to evenly space the system.

To move a barline:

This procedure is quite analogous to the procedure for Moving a Measure to the Previous System. See that topic for more details.

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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.

Musician will display the score in Page Layout View.

 

The color of the handle and the barline will be highlighted as blue, to show that you have selected the barline.

The barline's handle will be filled solid red to indicate that the barline has been moved from its default position:

 

To restore a barline to its default horizontal position:

The barline and the handle will be highlighted in blue to indicate the selection:

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Click the Default button.

This restores the barline to its default position.