Magnetic Layout

Magnetic Layout takes care of almost every detail of score layout for you - so effortlessly, you’ll hardly notice. This one feature saves so much time, it may be the greatest revolution in music engraving in 20 years.

Sibelius already has ‘magnetic’ slurs, accidentals, tuplets and so on – which stick to notes, and repel various other objects to avoid colliding with them. Now Magnetic Layout extends this intelligent behavior to everything else in your score, to produce truly professional results without you doing anything.

As usual, there’s lots of ingenuity under the hood, but you don’t have to think about it – just input the music, and let Sibelius 6 take care of the rest. It’s really that easy.

So, what does it do?

While you’re writing music, the dynamics, lyrics, chord symbols, rehearsal marks and all other objects quietly shift around to make sure your music is as clear as possible. They’re attracted into neat rows and columns, and repelled by other objects, making the best use of space on the page.

Dynamics line up in rows and columns, while avoiding notes, slurs, etc. Lyrics shift out of the way of low notes, but stay lined up in verses. Tempo marks, chord symbols, and many other objects also organize themselves neatly while avoiding collisions.
Drag something across a complex score, and other objects will helpfully jump out of the way. And on the rare occasion things get so tight that Sibelius 6 can’t prevent a collision, it will mark it in red so it’s easy to spot and fix.

Staff room

Staves behave just as intelligently – Sibelius can optimize the space between them to allow room for low/high notes, lyrics, tempo markings and rehearsals marks. It adds extra space between instrument families to make large scores easier to read, and saves space between other staves that don’t have much on them.

Advanced options

But there’s more: advanced users can freeze the positions of objects, for complex engraving situations which you want to stay fixed. Or switch off Magnetic Layout entirely, for individual objects or the whole score. And though you’ll probably never need to, you can even set which objects’ positions matter most, how much white space to allow round them, and which ones to align.

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