There has already been a discussion about the utility of having an “Avoid Collisions” toggle for Playing Techniques here.
I would also suggest an “Avoid Collisions” toggle for Dynamics, as in tightly packed scores and keyboard parts, it is sometimes desirable not to have things move apart; but rather just find a bit of free space for the symbol in Engrave mode.
… which brings me to the suggestion that if you have an “Avoid Collision” toggle on some objects, you really might as well have them on ALL objects.
The same is true for “Hide”.
And the X and Y Offset in the “Common” category of the Properties Panel aren’t actually common at all: they don’t seem to affect the position of most objects I could test.
A larger, consistent set of core common properties for all objects would make Dorico more powerful and easy to understand.
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Because of the way Dorico is architected, with bespoke processors written for every kind of notation, implementing an “avoids collision” option would need to be done individually, so it’s no small job, and in many cases I’m not sure it would make sense anyway. That doesn’t mean that it would be a bad idea specifically for playing techniques or dynamics, but you shouldn’t expect to see it for every kind of item.
Similarly, hiding an item is not something that can be achieved generically, and in most cases I don’t think this is a good idea, as rehearsed endlessly here on the forum for many years. I don’t think there are many items that it would make sense to be able to hide that are not already catered for.
As for the offset properties, very few items have only a single X and Y offset; most items have multiple segments and therefore require multiple properties to handle their offsets. Most items also have offsets that require different contexts (e.g. they apply globally, or just in one layout, or possibly even in one frame chain), which makes it difficult to have a single property or pair of properties.
We do think quite hard about all this stuff, and there are good reasons for all of the ways things work in Dorico. There’s always more we can do to improve matters (for example, perhaps we should hide the Common group properties more assiduously where they don’t apply), but we’ve arrived at the current situation after a good deal of consideration.
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As always I appreciate the thorough explanation. I just want to add that I ‘liked’ Ben’s post because I also have a fairly frequent need to disable collision avoidance on dynamics on vocal staves specifically.
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I basically just ignore these now, but I do vividly remember being very confused by these when I first started with Dorico. New users typically will assume that they must be doing something in error, not that the settings aren’t hooked up to anything and don’t actually do anything. Attempting to adjust positioning settings that don’t actually affect the positioning can make for a very frustrating experience for new users. I would prefer to see unusable settings vanish when selecting an item that they aren’t used for.
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