Engraving & Layout

The Engrave activity controls how a score or instrumental part is presented without changing its musical meaning. Keep composition and note editing in Write; use Engrave for house style, page geometry, system flow, condensing, and fine placement.

House style

The House Style tab contains document-wide engraving controls. Its search box filters categories by name and related terms.

Time signatures

Choose an appearance preset for conventional, oversized, or film-score time signatures. Depending on the preset, you can adjust distribution across staves, vertical position, scale, and numeral design.

Changes are previewed on the live score. Check several systems and any single-line percussion staves before settling on a score-wide treatment.

Chord symbols

Choose a chord-symbol preset for conventional notation, jazz symbols, plain text, or lowercase minor roots. The live preview applies the choice across the document without changing the semantic chord data.

Open Advanced to control root-letter case, major-seventh, minor, diminished, half-diminished, and augmented spellings, plus superscript or baseline extensions. Per-symbol display text remains available in Properties for an exception that should not change the document-wide house style. To remain playable, the override must describe the same harmony; unsupported or contradictory text is retained with an editor-only warning.

Chord visibility belongs to the instrument, not the layout: Automatic places the shared progression above the topmost displayed instrument, Show above the instrument's first displayed staff, and Hide suppresses it for that instrument wherever it appears. Adding or pasting a chord sets the affected instrument to Show for the entire progression, even after Hide. See Chord Symbols for entry, progression navigation, editing, and playback.

Text styles

Text styles keep repeated roles consistent across the document. Edit the style for titles, subtitles, composer and lyricist credits, copyright, tempo, dynamics, staff text, and other named roles rather than formatting every item individually.

Style controls include the font family, size, weight, italic treatment, color, and alignment where applicable.

Page setup

Open the Layouts tab to edit the score or instrumental part selected in the header. Page setup includes:

• paper size and orientation;
• page margins;
• staff size;
• page and system spacing.

Each score and instrumental part can carry its own page setup. A full score can therefore use larger paper and a smaller staff while part extracts use a page-turn-friendly format.

Systems and page flow

The Engrave workspace exposes system-level controls beside the score. Use them to:

• force a system break at a chosen measure;
• force a page break;
• control staff visibility for a particular system;
• inspect spacing and balance before publication.

Forced breaks are durable layout decisions. Use them sparingly: make the automatic layout do most of the work, then intervene for musical phrasing, rehearsal structure, or page turns.

Slurs and other curves

Select a slur to expose its engraving properties. You can adjust direction and fine geometry while the engine continues to avoid notes, stems, articulations, and other obstacles.

Prefer the automatic shape first. Manual control points are best reserved for musically important exceptions that cannot be expressed through direction or placement alone.

Condensing

Press Alt+C to open condensing controls for eligible multi-player material. Condensing changes the rendered view, not the MNX source parts: each instrument's music remains stored independently, and its instrumental part continues to draw from that source.

Always review condensed passages at entrances, divisi changes, unisons, and rhythmically independent writing.

For the distinction between MNX source parts, score definitions, scores, and instrumental parts, see Scores, Parts & Layouts. For final PDF output, see Publishing & Export.