Force duration - ties - dotted notes

(And I say this as one who spent 16 years with Finale before switching to Dorico several years ago. There are certainly still areas where I think Dorico could improve or where its “trying to help” can in fact get in the way, but the combination of user-adjustable engraving/notation defaults and the force duration tool is certainly not one of them. That is, in fact, quite powerful and saves hours upon hours of time. Promise.)

Well, actually my experience is, with complex tie-chains, that I need that each « specific » part of the chain must be "forced duration » in order to get the chain exactly as I need. By specific, I mean a notation that differs from what Dorico would use.
Honestly, apart from the project I’m working on now (filled with complex time signatures that change all the time, where I must respect 16ths notes groupings that do change from one bar to another…) where I discovered what I wrote first, I find force duration does work really well and easy, now.

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Ah, yes, I should’ve been more clear. I did in fact mean that only notes you’ve selected force duration for will maintain their durations properly. Any notes not selected will revert to Dorico’s defaults (though depending on the complexity, sometimes with small but easily fixable hiccups). But my larger point is that this is the way you’d expect it to work! :slight_smile:

All notes in the slur must have force duration. For example, if I have a half note at the end of a measure and want to tie it to a dotted half note in the next measure, I must set force duration for the half notes in both measures. If I only set force duration for the dotted note in the second measure, when I add the tie, the dotted note changes to a half note tied to a quarter note.

Yes. That’s precisely what I wrote earlier. Every bit of the tie chain must receive force duration. Independently.

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Which is also the way you would expect it to work. Why would Dorico force the duration of a note for which you haven’t selected force duration?

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Actually, I ended up on this page for the very reason that it did not work as expected. I had an 8th on the second half of beat 1 tied to a (forced duration) dotted half tied to a whole in the next measure, and it kept changing the dotted half to quarter + half (respecting the middle of the measure). In response to the things mentioned in this thread, the only thing I could get to work was to redo all three notes in the tie group with force duration and then the tie respected all the durations I wanted.

Huh, yeah, you know, when I posted that, I did what I thought was some decently thorough experimenting with the tool to make sure that most things I threw at it did indeed spit out what was expected. Like I said, I did run across some situations where that wasn’t the case (though at the time they did seem to be rare enough at the time, but alas, they are still there). I’ll be the first to admit that the tool still needs work; the pushback I was giving was to alvira’s seeming agreement with a number of outdated posts that had (mostly) been addressed (which I think less so speaks to the perfection of the tool today, and much more to how dire it was back in the early days…).

If I had to take a stab at what’s going on under the hood to cause your situation, I would guess that Dorico is performing the operation from left to right, so it’s not the forced note that is being tied; it’s being tied to. When two separate notes become one note, if they have different (and contradictory) properties, Dorico has to decide which properties take precedence, and in this case, I think it’s, like I said, the note on the left that wins. And since the note on the left has “force duration” turned off, the new resulting note becomes a note with force duration turned off.

On the one hand, I would tend to agree that this isn’t how it should work, but on the other hand, I presume the way that Dorico treats tied notes as single notes under the hood causes some complications in making the tool work exactly the way we’d like it to. I’d wager that was behind the inadequacies of the tool’s previous workings, and I’d wager it’s behind the few remaining issues. I do agree though, it would be nice to see the tool to receive more improvements in future versions.

FWIW, just so you know, force duration is a toggle now, so you shouldn’t need to reinput anything these days; you can just select the note and press O and that note is now forced. In your example, merely selecting the eighth note, pressing O, then tying (either in sequence or all at once) would do the trick.

In any case, cheers, and welcome to the forum! :wink: