Demo of bar number placement - 08_Horn in F - Demo.dorico (1.5 MB)
Here’s an example. Ideally m28-31 would all be vertically aligned. I understand that the system seeing nothing in m29 to push the bar number down, but it looks janky having it suddenly kick up relative to the other numbers. Even m30 and 31 look crooked, even though the hairpin and the “pp” marking look roughly the same vertical position.
M42-50 look decent, with m42-44 sitting “as a group” vertically aligned, while m45-46 as a separate group also vertically aligned.
Then on the last system, m51-53 look aligned (default distance), but m55 is slightly lower, and m56 is slightly lower again. Those three would also look better aligned.
I guess, ideally, what I’d like to see is something like Dynamic Grouping applied to Bar Numbers as well, so we could set groups of bar numbers that lock into vertical alignment and then let Collision Avoidance move the group as needed. That would keep things looking clean, instead of crooked like currently, while not forcing the entire system to get pulled away from the staff. In this example, if full System alignment is turned on, m42-44 and m51-53 both look wrong, because the bar numbers there end up very far from the staff due to being aligned with the bars that are reasonably pushed down by low notes + dynamic markings.
At this point, it seems like the most reliable way is to set the minimum distance close, Align across the system ON, and let the Collision Avoidance push the whole system’s bar numbers down as needed, for the whole system. And then manually select those which could go up and move them as a group. That way, everything always starts aligned, so moving a group results in that set of numbers still being aligned with each other.
Though, I think you have to individually click each bar number in Engrave to do this, right? A drag-select would really help with this process too, to “lasso” groups of bar numbers and push them up again when the system alignment pushes them too far down.
