I am right now in a session editing parts in Finale, painstakingly adjusting distance of bar numbers to staff. No good way to do it, especially not when clef is changing often. So I wanted to check how this is treated in Dorico.
I need the bar numbers closer to the staff for alto- and bass clef, and further away for the G glef. I can set a value for distance to staff that works for G-clef, but that will be to far away for the bass- and alto clefs. If I change the “distance to other objects” value, I would expect the clefs to be included in the “other objects”, but no.
I’m afraid it’s painstaking in Dorico, too. Set the global distance so that it works for most bar numbers, then work through your score and part layouts in Engrave mode, selecting and nudging the other bar numbers up and down using Alt+up/down arrow keys (or Alt+Cmd/Ctrl+arrow keys for larger distances).
Items in the preamble are treated a bit differently, that’s why they’re generally not considered for collision avoidance. Luckily we can set the distance for bar numbers per layout, so it’s not that much of a problem for parts.
Is there any real advantage in making the vertical gaps as small as possible? Or is it just a “that’s how it used to be done with hand engraving” thing?
It’s unlikely to save any vertical space on the page if you make all the gaps big enough to avoid G clefs.
That’s not what I am after. The screenshot was just to illustrate that the clef collides with the bar number.
Normally the distance to the bass clef staff is not a problem, only when I have to fit many systems on one page. Then I need the bar numbers closer. I like when the perceived distance to the clef is the same no matter what clef it is.
Bumping an old thread after searching for this. “Minimum distance from other objects” still doesn’t work for clefs in 2.2, right? We still have to change the settings in Setup/Layout Options based on whether the part predominantly has a clef that extends from the staff (like treble) or one that doesn’t? It would be really great if the minimum distance option would work in a future version, so we could set the number to a value closer to the staff for clefs that won’t collide and automatically have it adjusted by that minimum distance for treble, tenor, etc. Or perhaps have different default settings for different clefs.
Yeah, bar numbers avoiding clefs would be handy too when you’re showing bar numbers on every bar and you want to generally keep the bar numbers fairly tight to the staff lines except at the beginning of the system when it runs into the top (or bottom depending on your placement of bar numbers) of a clef.
This is a problem in Finale too and for years I’ve just used the option of showing the first bar number on a system after the clef, key and time signatures. (You can do this in Dorico too). It’s not visually ideal imho, but it does eliminate about 1/3 or more of the measure number wrangling that you have to do when formatting parts.
