Occasionally, the fact that note and rest elements are left-aligned leads to a result that simply doesn’t look right.:
I would prefer the whole notes to be centred under the smaller notes and rests:
AFAIK, there’s no way to achieve this in Dorico, other than to choose a music font whose whole notes are more or less the same size as the other noteheads. This wouldn’t solve the rest problem, though.
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The way to achieve this, though fiddly, is through manual note spacing. It’s a pain but it works.
That’s great, but I’m afraid I haven’t been able to figure out how to move the voices separately. Activating note spacing, selecting the square handle and then the round one moves the entire group horizontally (per staff). What am I missing?
It’s a pain. You can’t set a Voice Column for a rest, so you have to set the Voice Column Index for some of the notes to 1, which will give them separate handles (which can alternatively be adjusted from the Note Spacing properties in the Engrave mode properties panel). All the notes with Voice Column Index 1 will be to the right of the notes (and rests) with Voice Column index 0, until you nudge them back over.
Thanks. It is a bit of a pain but fortunately there weren’t too many of these in this document. It’s also a bit counter-intuitive and even slightly buggy. Once I’d selected the notes to change the voice column index, if I forgot to click away from the properties window before doing anything else, nothing would happen but then I discovered that Dorico had set the voice column index to 41!
This is also a big pain when you hav a whole note chord but one note is cue-sized (organ pedal note that’s optional, for instance). It looks very wrong and you have to do this too.
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That’s one of the things that was a lot easier in Finale, even in the core program, not to mention being able applying a plugin (TG Tools) which could shift slightly left all whole notes in a document by a given amount. I can imagine implementing a feature like this in Dorico to be difficult but if it ever does get done, it’ll be well thought-out.