Condensing Issue

Dorico
#1

Hello,

I’m running into a weird condensing issue in bar 26 on the downbeat of the attached project. Dorico is for some reason adding an eighth rest above the note, and the note is up-stem instead of down-stem. The slur terminates on the rest (which should not exist) instead of the note.

I’ve found that if I shorten the note by an eighth so it doesn’t tie over to bar 26 that the problem goes away, but is there any way to fix the condensed score without doing that?

Project is attached.

Thanks!
Dorico Condensing Issue Test.7z (680 KB)

#2

The issue is that Dorico wants to use a different form of condensing from the condensing change at bar 21 than it is using for the previous bars on the system, and a condensing change cannot produce a result that would ideally use a different set of staves on the same system. If you can contrive to get a system break at bar 21, you’ll find that the spurious rest goes away.

#3

Oh yes I see, it is the condensing change in bar 21 causing the problem. If I delete the condensing change then everything is OK. I will simply move the condensing change to a later system since it doesn’t have any impact in this system anyway.

I never realized that a condensing change could cause a problem like this if it did not occur at the beginning of a system.

Thanks!

#4

So that is all fixed now - thank you.

One other question. At one point I have a playing technique “open” in horn 2, and a cautionary “(open)” in horn 1 since they were already not muted. Obviously in this case, it results in double stemmed writing instead of a single stem with “a 2” because it thinks “open” and “(open)” are two different things. Is there currently any way to get the condensed score to show a single “open” and “a 2” for horns 1 and 2 but the horn 1 part to show the cautionary “(open)”?

#5

You might be able to do it via a condensing change by disabling the notation option for amalgamating playing techniques and setting manual condensing, perhaps, but I’ve not tried it.

#6

Tried it - it doesn’t seem to work. It isn’t a huge deal of course - the double stemmed unisons are not that obnoxious, but it would be nice in a future version if there was a “Parenthesized” option for text playing techniques like it has for dynamics, and the “Parenthesized” option could be ignored for condensing purposes.

It would also be nice if there was a way of defining an “abbreviated form” of a playing technique without having to recreate it as something else. Currently I sometimes have to abbreviate techniques like “sul tasto” to “s.t.” to save space, and if I need to do parenthesized versions of both, I end up needing four playing techniques - “sul tasto”, “(sul tasto)”, “s.t.” and “(s.t.)”. It would be a nice feature if there was a field where I could add a short form to the main “sul tasto” expression as “s.t.” or whatever and have a property that allows using the abbreviated form without having to define it as a new expression.

EDIT: Actually I got it to work somehow now, but the requests above would still be nice-to-have features. :slight_smile: