Hi all, bear with me — this is sort of a beast to explain. I’m trying to match a publisher’s spec on accidental positioning/arrangement, and in the process noticed a few things I believe could be improved. (Let me say, though, the overall outlook on accidentals in Dorico is impressive!)
Here are two chords involving flats (dotted lines added just for reference). The top example is with Percentage of accidental stack width allowed to overlap with adjacent stack: 10%
and bottom example with 60%. In both cases, Distance between adjacent accidental stacks is set to Allow optical adjustment. The bottom example is my desired look — I don’t think I can achieve this in Dorico without a lot of manual work, but I still think Dorico’s settings could produce a better result than this.
Expected: both of these would have some kerning (the bowl of the lower flat sliding under the upper one). I’d expect about 10% of the flat in the upper example, and 60% of the lower one.) But right now, the lower set (60%) has a small amount of kerning, while the first one has virtually none. I imagine this has to do with the calculated width of the stack as a whole, but shouldn’t “optical adjustment” create the expected amount of kerning?
Dorico file is attached — these are both from page 1, system 2 of my tests. For anyone who is curious, I’ll also attach my spec document — basically, the results I’m trying to get close to. The fonts don’t match here, of course, so you have to use your imagination.
While I’m asking for pie-in-the-sky items:
- I wish we had more control of parenthetical accidentals; specifically, that we could control the shapes of (b), (#), and (natural) more exactly.
- I might be misunderstanding this preference, but I think the Gap to right of rightmost accidental should be accidental-dependent? In other words, I want a different amount of space in that place, depending on whether it’s a flat, natural, sharp, etc. Really, I just want at least the same amount of space I already defined for each of those objects.
Accidental Tests.zip (1.52 MB)
Accidental Tests (Bravura).dorico.zip (725 KB)
Whoa, Daniel, you’ve blown my mind! Thank you, it never occurred to me to edit the accidentals themselves (but of course makes perfect sense) This is amazing. Thank you!
