Accents on empty noteheads jumping around randomly when re-opening a project

I am using empty noteheads witht he “3 spaces as a notehead”-trick.
By default, the accents on these are pretty inconsistent, but even after adjusting them manually, when reopening a project, they randomly jump around again.

Here’s what I achieved with manual spacing in a violin part some days ago (I know it’s not perfect engraving, but it was consistent):

Here’s how it looked like today after opening the project:

… and after directly closing the project (no edits, no save), and opening again:

so you can see, the issue appears to be random. Sadly, I noticed it after I sent a badly engraved score (which I thought I took care of) to my musicians…

Can you provide a minimal project that would allow us to investigate the issue? Just the passage shown in your pictures here should be sufficient.

thanks for your reply!
Here’s the file:
jumping accents.dorico (957.5 KB)

I’ve (finally) been looking into this. The problem is that the approach of using space characters as noteheads for “headless” notes really can’t work reliably. In order to resolve the positions of the articulations, accidentals, etc., Dorico relies on the bounding shape of the noteheads, but for a space character, there is no bounding shape: just a width. The apparently random behaviour is happening because of tiny variations in the calculations of the bounding shape.

You would probably have better luck using an empty graphic scaled to roughly the right size for a notehead.

Obviously in the longer term what is really needed is either a native way to handle this kind of glissando notation, or to hide a notehead (or perhaps both).

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Thanks Daniel, I will try to find a more stable notehead. And thank you especially for not forgetting about this thread!

…or in the shorter term! This notation is now officially supported in Dorico 4.3, yay!

P.S. I recognized the music example in the video IMMEDIATELY :wink: I feel honoured!

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