Diminuendo to niente and beat placement

As far as I can tell, it’s not possible to have a niente indication centered under a notehead at the end of a diminuendo. I imagine this is because Dorico does not conceive of niente, whether circle or n as a dynamic, but solely as a hairpin modification.

Strictly speaking this makes some sense as niente has to be a final culminating dynamic (how can one continue to hold nothing as a dynamic?) but certainly in terms of visual tidiness, especially in smaller note values where the difference between the beginning of the note and the end of its duration is inconsequential, it would be nice to be able to achieve this. And while there’s a minor semantic difference in what contexts niente is achieved as a dynamic, it still is a dynamic and should behave as such.

I struggle to think of any use case that would suffer if the niente circle or n had the same placement behavior as p or f than its current behavior. In the below example, with current behavior, treating niente as a hairpin modification only allows two positions: immediately preceding a note, or immediately preceding the next note/rest. And if treated as a dynamic, the only change would be adding a middle position of being under the beat.
nientee

I see your point. That said, purely in the interest of getting the job done today with the software as it is:

The end of the hairpin goes at whichever caret position. The notehead isn’t relevant, I don’t think.
In this case you could extend the hairpin by half the length of the final notehead, though granted the grid rhythmic resolution isn’t as granular as you’d like.

1 Like

Thanks for this workaround — this is what I ended up doing in this small project this came up on.

It’s a really minor point I’m bringing up, and it exists in this weird gap between semantic realization, Dorico’s design behavior, and the general understanding of niente’s stylization as a dynamic glyph (at least n). I’m definitely not suffering because of it, but I’m curious Daniel’s opinion.

I dare say you wouldn’t plan to reach niente before the end of the note. Thus, if it occurs at the point of the rest, I’m sure the player will understand what you intend.

2 Likes

Is this what you are trying to achieve?

Niente

I simply went into Engrave mode and moved it to where I wanted it.

As things stand, Dorico simply draws the niente mark (whether the circle or the italic n) at the position of the end of the hairpin, rather than where an immediate dynamic such as p or f would go, as you have found. It would be annoyingly fiddly to change, but I agree that it would be nice for us to handle this in a future version.