Tried to use the smallest "allowed" staff size, but I think I still could include more measures per page

[snake_cake]

Hi. I composed a violin sonata with Dorico. While there may be someone to turn the pages at the concert, I'd like to minimize the turns.

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I'm using a 6 mm staff size for the piano (as per Elaine Gould's book) and 4.5 mm for the violin. This yields pages with 4 systems on an A4 sheet (which seems to be typical in many scores I've checked), but I think I could maybe squeeze in more measures on each page. I'm just very tempted to use a smaller staff size to have 5 systems in each page, which is something that I've seen as well (even though I don't know the original paper size):

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What do you think? Is there some Dorico trick I don't know? Can I get away with a smaller staff size ? My intuition thinks so because it's not an orchestral part and I can read smaller staves at my piano, but I'm probably wrong.

Here are a few more pages of the piece: https://drive.google.com/file/d/18owdQl ... sp=sharing

Thanks

[benwiggy]

I don't think there's any 'trick' -- just try a smaller staff size; and reduce the staff-to-staff distance to something tiny. (And probably the gap between the violin and piano.)

I suspect that the example score you've shown uses a larger page size than A4 -- but not necessarily much larger. Probably 9 x 12".

However, computer engraving usually can't get as much on the page vertically as hand engraving -- not without a lot of manual adjustments. You may need to reduce stems and move things about to get the staves closer together.

[snake_cake]

Thanks for the feedback! Will try all of these, I also checked what you wrote about those Henle engravings.

BTW love your Nepomuk!

[OCTO]

The problem with reducing staff size is, as I believe in Dorico as well, that it reduces proportionally the staff lines, stems and font sizes equally.
But it the practice it shouldn't be the case.  The engravers knife is always of the same size, only the pressure applied to the metal plate.  It means that the resized staff (let us say to 60%) should not have all items proportionally resized to 60%.

Anyone working with LaTex fonts (CMU Serfi) knows that there are multiple font variants for each size. Smaller size are more bold, semi extended.  Still it is the same weight.

Therefore we have so many scores today that with reduced staff size you get hair-lines scores, and music is almost vanishing, impossible to read.

Here is an example.  This is NOT my engraving, I have found it on the Internet—I simply don't have any files at the moment on this computer I am writing from.  Check the first and the second page.  Do you see a difference?

[RMK]

Yes

The second page looks much better.

The first page looks like a Professional Composer PDF from the 1980's.

[snake_cake]

The problem with reducing staff size is, as I believe in Dorico as well, that it reduces proportionally the staff lines, stems and font sizes equally.
But it the practice it shouldn't be the case.  The engravers knife is always of the same size, only the pressure applied to the metal plate.  It means that the resized staff (let us say to 60%) should not have all items proportionally resized to 60%.

Very good point about the staff line and stem thickness. Is something I'd seen mentioned before but I still hadn't considered it for this engraving.

In the end I could make things work with a 5.75 mm staff size, so I'm not that far away from the 6 mm theoretical limit. I thickened the stems and staff lines only a tiny a bit. I think everything turned out fine, I had to do a lot of little tweaks, to achieve the right vertical spacing and page breakes in some pages, but in others there's very little crowding

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Some page turns even allowed me to have only 4 systems per page.

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Thank you