Flat Slurs - ends are bent outwards

Dorico
1

Hello,

In more recent versions of Dorico, I’ve found that flat slurs no longer really look correct by default in most cases. It is not difficult to get them to do crazy things, and for many of my older scores that I’ve opened up in newer Dorico versions, I’ve had to go through and convert all flat slurs to regular slurs and manually drag the engrave handles to flatten them somewhat because the flat slurs do not look right by default anymore except in certain cases. I’m not sure whether this started in 3.5 or in 4.0, but it was somewhere around there.

Here is an example of a problematic short passage with this problem. First, here is with a default formatted regular slur, with position and appearance reset:

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image817×184 14.3 KB

Now, the same slur, but with curvature type changed to flat:

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image808×232 14.4 KB

As you can see, the two ends of the slur are bent outwards from the note. This did not happen in older versions of Dorico and just started in some update.

I can manually fix the flat slurs by moving a bunch of things around in engrave mode, but it ends up being faster to just convert it to a regular slur and manually flatten it.

Any ideas as to what might be wrong?

2

I’m racing through many threads on the forum this morning so don’t have time for a detailed investigation right now, but try switching off Interpolate vertical position of slur either side of break on the Slurs page of Engraving Options. Does that cause flat slurs to be handled more in the way you remember? (This isn’t necessarily a solution, but it would at least indicate where the change is coming from.)

1 Like
3

Hi Daniel,

I just checked and the file in question where I had a lot of flat slurs already had that option off. Turning it on makes the slur much better immediately. I don’t remember changing that option, but I guess that I must have at some point because I created a new file and it has that enabled as the default (unless the default has changed?).

4

That option would be on in newer projects and off in older ones; typically when we introduce an option that can have a significant effect on the appearance of existing projects, we keep it switched off in existing projects.

1 Like