Hello Dorico team,
I’m encountering what I believe to be a bug when writing a measure in 5/4 with a very specific set of Notation options enabled: if Notation Options > Beam Grouping > Simple Time Signatures Without a Half-Bar “Eighth notes (quavers) in quarter note (crotchet denominator) time signatures” is set to “Allow to cross beats”, and Notation Options > Note Grouping > Time Signatures With Irregular Meter “Note grouping for 5/4” is toggled to "Irregular simple (1+1+1+1+1/4), Dorico will beam together an entire 5/4 bar. (Settings and outcome pictured below)
This is a notation that I’ve never seen in printed music and is 1000% never how 5/4 should ever be beamed: ideally, 5/4 should be beamed as either 3+2, 2+3, or 1+1+1+1+1, and never as 5. Gould agrees with at least part of this assessment, as her table on p. 155 of Behind Bars explicitly says to only group 5/4 as 2+3 or 3+2; and in jazz, pop, broadway, etc. it’s not uncommon for the beats to be grouped just as 5 individual pairs of eighth notes/quavers.
I believe a possible solution is to make the “Eighth notes (quavers) in quarter note (crotchet denominator) time signatures” > “Allow to cross beats” setting to only ever affect 3/4 time signatures (in which case the larger section should probably only refer to 3/4, 3/8, or 3/2 rather than "Simple Time Signatures Without a Half Bar), when 5/4 is set to be either a 3+2 or 2+3 grouping to treat it under the hood as 3/4+2/4 or 2/4+3/4, and then finally if 5/4 is set to “irregular simple” to treat each pair of eighth notes as their own unit.
Ninja edit: there’s a semi-related bug where if 5/4 is set to be grouped as either 3+2 or 2+3, Dorico will beam together the entirety of those beat groupings regardless of the note durations and will produce the following outcome, which breaks the “rule” of only beaming together sixteenth notes in groups of 4 in simple meters or 6 in compound meters:
Best,
Ryan