Force horizontal cross-staff beams

Hello together,

I am currently encountering the following hurdle when using Dorico:
I would like to have horizontal beams for motifs with repeated notes.

The result with the setting “allow slant” (Engraving Options → Beams → Repeated Notes and Patterns) is as expected:


However, when changing to “force horizontal”, only the beams that are not cross-staffed are adjusted.


Since I have a lot of similar motifs in this one particular piece, I would like to have an automation instead of adjusting each beam manually. Am I missing any other options or settings?

I have not yet found similar topics with a solution to the problem in this forum.

Thanks and regards.

Welcome to the forum! It appears that these options do not apply to beamed groups with only some cross-staff notes, which doesn’t surprise me. I suppose the best you can do for this kind of thing (beats 3–4 of your example) is adjust one beam in engrave mode and then duplicate the figure.

I’ve not tried it, so apologies if I am mistaken, but I believe the Beam direction property should still apply in these situations, which should make it reasonably quick to produce a horizontal beam.

1 Like

Confirmed! Thanks, Daniel.

Thanks for your quick feedback on this, which is appreciated.

I should have been more specific in my question.

It’s apparently possible to adjust this manually with the beam direction settings. But in my case, I would come up with about 400 groups of 4 semiquavers that conceptually need to be written cross-staffed. Of these, about ⅓ happen to have repeated notes and/or patterns (randomly). Of course, I can search for them separately and correct the behavior—which is hard to do semi-automatically, since I don’t see a filtering method here, right?

Based on the previous answers, the question would rather be why the above settings do not apply to cross-staffed notes. Is this by design? Is it an error? Is it because there are special notation rules for this particular case? …

Thanks and regards.