… But when there are many small notes in the instrumental stave accompanied by long notes in the piano, I would like the note-spacing to be much tighter. Does anybody know if there is a way to achieve this without having to manually adjust each bar? …

You could

- select the entire region where the piano has long notes,

- apply a tighter note spacing to the selected region.

The “global” note spacing is set in Document Options - Music Spacing > Spacing Widths.

You can set a tighter note spacing, and apply the tighter note spacing to the selected region.

Do you have Jari Williamson’s plug-in JW Note Spacing ?

Thanks once again Peter. I do have JW Note Spacing but setting it to "Tight Spacing" doesn't change much in the problematic bars. I have played around with the Spacing Widths in Doc Options but this does not change the fundamental problem of the cue bar notes occupying the same horizontal space as in the larger piano part.

Is there any other way I could set a tighter note spacing in a selected region, apart from using the JW Plugin ?

My best idea for the moment is to move the problematic barlines manually and deactivate "Automatic Update Layout".

THANKS

… when there are many small notes in the instrumental stave accompanied by long notes in the piano, I would like the note-spacing to be much tighter …

… the fundamental problem of the cue bar notes occupying the same horizontal space as in the larger piano part …

If I understand you correctly, the problem is that the notes in the (smaller) instrumental staff are spaced, as if they were entered in the (bigger) piano Grand Staff - right?

How was the Finale document set up with staff sizes?

- with the piano Grand Staff at “default” size, and the instrumental staff at “down-scaled” size?

or

- with the instrumental staff at “default” size, and the Grand Staff at “up-scaled” size?

Instrumental staff at 60% and piano staff at default size ........

As a test, try “the other way around”:

Instrumental staff at “default size”, and piano Grand Staff up-scaled at 167 % size.

I suspect that the spacing is based on the staves at “default size”.

It works !!

What a great fix !! I will set up my templates to incorporate this. Trying to incorporate it into existing files looks very complex but for all new stuff, brilliant. THANKS !!!