I have an instance I just noticed, nothing has been adjusted in engrave mode, where the “poco a poco” marking collides with the accidental of the next note.
there is room for vertical movement, and there would have been room for the notes to be slightly more spread out by Dorico’s spacing algorithm.
I’m not seeing how this happened, nor how to correct it without going into the engraver mode (which I like to avoid as much as possible.
I’d need to see the project itself, and indeed have all of the same fonts installed, etc., to be able to reproduce this. On the face of it, I agree this looks like a collision Dorico should avoid. However, it doesn’t typically require there to be any horizontal distance between items: the profile that it builds to determine whether items collide is normally tight on the item to the left and right, so it could well be that Dorico in fact finds that these items don’t collide. Some minimum horizontal padding value would be handy in cases such as this, but it’s not typically what Dorico does.
You could try adding a space character in the Suffix property in the Properties panel.
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thanks. I will try this.
I was surprised y this little error (it barely sows in the score, honestly) because until this very moment, I’ve found that Dorico’s spacing has been nothing but perfection.
the “poco a poco” is from the checkbox in the properties panel. I looked for a way to add a space character, but there’s was nowhere that seemed to affect that particular text.
I ended up moving the entire orchestra’s “cresc. poco a poco” indication back a few spaces in Engrave mode, which cleaned up the look. But it’s not the ideal situation.
This wasn’t an import or anything. It’s actually the very first file I created in Dorico 3.5, from scratch (in December 2021). So maybe I displaced something I shouldn’t have at that time. I’ll have to look deeper into this.
Strangely, even moving a measure off that system, thus giving myself more horizontal room, still gives me a conflict there. Very strange.
I’d be happy to look into it, but I’ll need the project file itself.
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Here is a more extreme example of the conflict:
Conflict between poco a poco and note.dorico (439.7 KB)
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most definitely “more extreme”! in my example, the last letter of “poco” touches the flat very slightly, enough to be annoying, but not enough to negatively impact readability.
Might this be something that recently popped up in an update?
Because I don’t remember noticing this error before in my score.
I’ve been micro-editing this score for publication for a while now.
Hi johnkprice,
i noticed that that activating “abbreviate” (just the switch) resolves the issue…
Maybe this can help in defining what is causing the conflict…
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it DID resolve the vertical placement, which allowed the text to fit beneath the notes (in my case, which is very similar to John’s example).
however, it does create the problem that the text is now showing “crescendo” rather than “cresc.”
Now I tried to just add another note in the following bar and the “P cresc.poco a poco” finds its correct position…
After adding that note, if you decrease the left and right page margins to 33pt, the conflict reappears.
in my example, the next measure starts with a rest.
the cresc. poco a poco starts there and continues for a good many measures.
I don’t understand why the viola part underneath, with pretty much the same material, spaces the dynamics a bit further down, thus avoiding the conflict.
I’m reposting a fuller example from my score. Note that in this image, I’ve re-adjusted all of the dynamics in those parts to pull them back ½ on the horizontal axis in Engrave Mode.
As a matter of fact, considering the viola part’s stems actually don’t go as far down as the 2nd violin’s, I’m surprised that the issue isn’t also present in the violas. If anything, the 2nd violin’s dynamics should be automatically placed further from the staff because of those protruding stems (beats 2 and 3).
I tried to recreate your example and Dorico made a nice job positioning everything without manual adjustment. maybe if you can share your project (or a cut-down version of it) would be helpful…
indeed… :- 
I did my best, but had no idea how to remove measures and flows.
the problem is in the 3rd movement of a 50 page score.
anyway, in this file, it’s on page 20, 2nd system, 2nd violins. (measure 169)
concerto_violon_spacing error.dorico (915.5 KB)
I’ve been looking at this with a colleague for the past couple of hours, and we now know what’s going wrong.
The problem affects specifically text-based gradual dynamics like “cresc. poco a poco”. The processing involved is complicated, but in a nutshell the problem is that the gradual dynamic is being moved horizontally by the immediate dynamic to its left, but at some level Dorico isn’t keeping track of that shift, so when it comes to perform collision avoidance, it’s performing that collision avoidance against where it would be positioned if the immediate dynamic weren’t there.
It will require a bit of unpicking, but we will certainly fix this in a future version.
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thanks Daniel.
I’ll make do with manual corrections in the meanwhile.
Daniel, your ability to explain technical things in ways that most people can understand is one of the reasons I became interested in Dorico back when you were writing blog posts about its development, and why I have been a Dorico user since the day version 1.0 was released.
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