Considerations on dynamics alignment

Hi, I have searched the forum on this, and observed that the topic has already been discussed, however I thought it might be useful to share some thoughts from the experience of my first full project on Dorico.
When working with instrumental parts where bar numbers are placed beneath the staff, I found the automatic management of non grouped dynamics a little too conservative. In fact, when writing directly in the software, it can happen that subsequent dynamics are added in multiple iterations and therefore they don’t get grouped automatically, and the results is what appears in the attachments.
Now, I understand and really appreciate the concept of dynamic grouping vs ungrouping, however I feel that a result like that in the images might be aligned optically at least in cases like bar 4 in Example 1, by lowering the first hairpin even when they are not grouped.
A consequence of the current logic, in fact, is that one spends a good deal of time grouping dynamics after the fact, as a tool to align them, which I feel partially defeats the purpose of the otherwise amazing automatic object management in Dorico.
Is this something that I only am feeling, and what is more, am I missing something in engraving options that might do the job already?


Dear Marcovalerio1,
I do not think you’re missing anything… But to speed up things, I’ve learned to enter some dynamics directly grouped, when there’s a crescendo leading to a forte I enter <f in the popover with the proper selection of notes (ending right before where I want the f to end) and so on.
And also creating a shortcut to group dynamics — I also created one to ungroup but this latter does not work, I have to investigate about it… With the shortcut I save a great load of time when dealing with pages of dynamics to group !

At least on these shores, the most common procedure when using bar numbers below the staff and on every bar, is to have them centered horizontally. Using that setting, the bar numbers themselves will move away and leave the dynamics closest to the staff …

Hi.

Marc, you are right: When you copy music that is alreay laid out in front of you, putting in dynamics in groups is great.

But Marco is talking about the creative process of writing, which has given my headaches, too. You put a “p” here and a “f” there, and later you find that connecting those two with a crescendo would have been great in the first place. I ended up deleting all dynamics and re-entering them as a group, since grouping of dynamics across many staves made Dorico crash a few times, so I would not try this anymore.

Dear Estigy,
I do not recall having read about that kind of crash before (but I might as well have forgotten)… Is this bug solved ?

I wrote about it here on the forum but could not reproduce it reliably. It happened on two different Files, all of them created in Dorico from scratch.