Hi Everyone!
Is it possible to adjust the horizontal space taken by the quarter notes in the second measure of box [P] so that they are equidistant? My goal is to make the hairpin mezza di voce dynamics in the upper staves appear as though they start on the first and third beats.
Presumably one could make a note-spacing change to do that.
Sometimes you just need or want equal size bars, or having other absolute measurements. Due to the way music engraving apps are architected for highly intelligent automated layout, it seems to remove the ability to do this simple thing. It’s really hard. Note spacing in Dorico never quite achieves it for me, it’s hard in Musecore as far as I know, and even in Lilypond this goes against the grain of the layout engine.
A contemporary colleague I work with wants all his bars to be 3cm in width. [I don’t agree with this, but he’s the boss.] I cannot achieve this, and it would force the layout engine to continually make bad decisions.
I rather suspect we are going to have this problem forever. That colleague also wants strict proportional notation and I cant get that either, despite helpful forum members suggesting fiddling with note spacing to 2.
Hi @christophereispiano, following the suggestion by @Derrek, here some possible usage of NSC (and other methods):
(Note Spacing Change [value for quarter note] is set to the factory 4 in Layout Options.)
The first NSC is inserted at beat 3 of bar 2. The second one, at the beginning of bar 3, is set to Reset:
Here other 2 possibilities (hidden 16th in an extra voice*, and custom spacing ratio of 2). But I think the previous one is better:
(*)
(for this you would need to set further NSP in the parts, to compensate for the 16th…)
And finally the old an sometimes very useful Note Spacing (overrides):
Dorico file example:
spacing for hairpins-NSC.dorico (1.4 MB)
All very workaroundish. Wouldn’t it be good to have a dialog that says - let me stop the autolayout size just in this region and type in 3cm width? [yes, I know the problems. But it would be nice…]
Feels a little pedestrian, but what about just dragging the darn things in Engrave? 
This:
doesn’t feel like a workaround at all, really…
