I must be doing something terribly wrong! I’m attaching an excerpt of the file. If you don’t mind, can you take a look to see where I’ve gone wrong?
Riddled copy.dorico (698.1 KB)
Yes, when you use a rhythmic cue, Dorico treats that part of the staff as if it had two voices for the purposes of determining stem direction, which is not the convention of how rhythmic cues should work. You can manually flip stems using the F key, and depending on the content that can be either very simple or quite annoying. There’s also a nasty effect where beams on the staff will move above the rhythmic cues as part of some misplaced collision avoidance. It’s all fixable in Engrave mode, but in some instances in can be laborious… If you’re having trouble flipping some stems, it might be because they’re part of a tie chain. You can flip them if you change to Engrave mode and select them, but you might need to adjust the tie as well.
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No need to fix it in Engrave, you need to adjust the voice column index, as outlined here: Rhythmic cue gets transferred up, but incomplete - #3 by mset
Interesting … I’ll try that solution next time it happens, thanks. I’ll add it to my list of rhythm cue workarounds, which hopefully one day won’t be necessary.
I followed the link above to read about the voice column index and noticed that in the attached image the stems on the main staff do not seem to be affected by the cue. I know it’s possible the OP of that thread manually adjusted them, but if so, they did not mention it.
Therefore, I’m wondering if someone can please confirm for me when and why the stems will or will not be affected by adding a rhythmic cue.
Further, I can’t imagine a single situation in which one might want a rhythmic cue (assuming it appears above the staff, as it does via the default settings) and would ever want the stems on the main staff to be anything other than the default. It seems to me that the whole point of a rhythmic cue above the staff is that it’s out of the way of the staff and not interacting with it graphically.
I think it’s not in dispute that the rhythm cue stems are a problem, and I’m pretty sure that the team are aware of it.
Stems on the staff under a rhythm cue will currently behave according to their voice direction. An upstem voice will have all the stems up, and a downstem voice will have all the stems down. So it’s possible that you might sometimes be able to make life easier by playing around with voices. My guess is that it would generally be more difficult than doing the Engrave Mode/Voice column tweaking as described in this thread.