Editing score properties

Ctrl+P (or the Properties pill) opens Score Properties — a searchable panel covering everything about the score that isn’t notes: who wrote it, how the page is laid out, and a live preview of what it’ll look like printed.

Header fields

Title, Subtitle, Dedication, Composer, Arranger, Lyricist, and Copyright print on the score’s title page exactly as typed here. A separate Score Name (under Score Identity) is what shows on the Projects screen — it falls back to Title when left blank, so most scores never need to set it explicitly.

Layout

Paper Size (A4, Letter, Legal, A3, A5, or Tabloid) and Orientation (portrait or landscape) set the page itself. Staff Size is a drop-down of the standard rastral sizes — the staff heights publishers use for different kinds of music, from Beginner / large-print (9.2 mm) down to a Miniature score (3.7 mm), with Instrumental part (7.0 mm) as the default. The size is the staff height in millimeters: the span across all five lines. Pick Custom… to open Advanced, where a fine slider (drag, use the −/+ buttons, or arrow keys) sets any height in between. Either way the size scales every staff on the page uniformly. Margins are four independent values in millimeters — top, bottom, left, right. Ragged Last Line leaves the final system at its natural width instead of stretching it to fill the page.

Margin Mode controls how the left/right margins apply across pages:

• Same (the default) — the left and right margins are identical on every page.
• Mirrored — the two side margins become Inside and Outside and swap on facing pages, so a bound book keeps a consistent binding (inside) margin down the spine. Odd pages bind on the left, even pages on the right. Give the inside margin extra width if you plan to bind or hole-punch the printout.

A left- or right-positioned page number follows the same mirroring, so it stays in the correct printable band on both facing pages. (An Outside Edge page number does this on its own even without Mirrored margins.)

Font Style

Font Style sets the fonts for the whole score. Standard is the clean default (Bravura notation with the Academico text face); Handwritten turns the entire page into a hand-copied jazz-lead-sheet look — Petaluma notes, handwritten lettering, and handwritten marks together. The choice travels with the score, so collaborators and anyone viewing a shared score see the same fonts.

Open Advanced to mix fonts by role — this is what Custom means:

• Notation — every music symbol: noteheads, clefs, accidentals, rests, dynamics, and the small marks that sit inside text such as pedal markings, 8va lines, and D.S./Coda (Bravura or Petaluma).
• Text — all the lettering: titles, lyrics, chord symbols, and tempo and dynamic words (Academico or the handwritten Petaluma Script).

Text follows Notation unless you set it, so choosing a preset is usually all you need; the roles are there when you want, say, handwritten notes with plain lyrics. (Petaluma’s handwritten lettering is a single weight, so bold and italic text share the one hand-drawn style.)

Spacing

Vertical Spacing sets how much room sits between the horizontal lines of music, as a preset — Compact, Default, or Spacious. Open Advanced to set the three gaps individually (in staff-spaces): between systems, between the staves of a single instrument (such as a piano’s grand staff), and between separate instruments. Editing any of them switches the preset to Custom. These set the base spacing; QuickStave still distributes any leftover space on a page evenly between systems so the music fills the page.

Horizontal Spacing controls how loosely notes are spaced left-to-right, again as a Compact / Default / Spacious preset. Its Advanced disclosure has four controls. Duration spacing scales the rhythmic spacing curve (1.00× is the default). Minimum note gap is the clear space between one note’s ink and the next notehead. Minimum rhythmic spacing keeps distinct onset columns apart across voices and staves. Measure padding controls both the final note-to-barline clearance and the gap after a barline. The three distances are in staff-spaces. Lower values produce visibly tighter music in the scrolling editor as well as allowing more music per printed line; glyph widths and collision-specific safeguards such as accidental and lyric clearance remain intact.

Text

Two categories of on-score text can be resized: Lyrics and Directives (tempo marks, dynamics, expression and technique text, rehearsal marks, tuplet numbers, and chord symbols). Each is a Small / Normal / Large preset; open Advanced for a fine Size slider (1.00× is the default — a multiplier on the built-in size, so text keeps scaling with the staff size). Directives’ Advanced also has a Base size that scales the whole group plus individual sliders — Tempo, Dynamics, Rehearsal marks, Tuplet numbers, Chord symbols — to fine-tune one kind on its own. Choosing a preset resets the whole category to that size.

Titles, part names, page numbers, and navigation marks (D.S., Coda) keep their standard sizes and aren’t affected. Sizes apply everywhere the score is drawn — the editor, the print preview, and exports.

Beams

Two settings decide how beams treat rests across the whole score:

• Beam over rests (on by default) — a rest inside a beat doesn’t break the beam; the beam runs over it. Turn it off and every rest breaks its beam.
• Stemlets (off by default) — a short stem from the beam toward each rest under it. With stemlets on, a beam may also start or end on a rest, so it can cover a whole beat.

To change the beaming at one note or rest instead, see Changing how notes are beamed.

Page numbers

A dedicated section controls where printed page numbers appear: Vertical Position (top or bottom), Horizontal Position (left, center, right, or Outside Edge — right on odd pages, left on even pages, useful for a book-style layout read as spreads), whether to Show on First Page, and a Starting Number offset for a score that’s a movement within a larger bound collection.

Preview and printing

The Preview tab renders the score exactly as it will paginate and print — the real music font, not a screenshot — and updates live as you change any setting above. Print and Save PDF are available right here (the same feature Share & Export offers under Print / Save to PDF — see Exporting your score), so you don’t need to leave this panel just to check how many pages a change produced.

Cloud details and version history

Signed-in users with a cloud-synced score get two extra sections: Description and Tags (used for organizing your scores and shown on a published score’s public page), and a History toggle in the header that switches to Version History for restoring an earlier saved version — see Restoring an earlier version.

Tips

• Ctrl+F jumps to the search box, which filters every section (including Layout and Page Numbers) down to matching fields — the panel hides sections with no match rather than showing them empty.
• Tab moves to the next field; Esc closes the panel, committing whatever field you were mid-edit on first.
• Every change here applies immediately and is a normal undoable edit — there’s no separate Save or Cancel step.