I’d like to request an engraving option for accents to be left-aligned horizontally.
This was a common practice, used by major German, British, French, and Italian publishers, which was lost with the transition to computer engraving.
I attach examples from:
You are correct. Traditionally, accents were longer, since they were derived from dynamic hairpins.
The accents in Dorico are always centered, regardless of the width of the symbol.
Many of the examples are not entirely left-aligned. The first example, has several accents that appear a little over the left-hand side of the note – often more aligned with the ledger line.
In the 3rd example, the accents clearly go past the stem, even if they still sit a bit more to the right.
I’d agree that the larger accents inevitably raise questions about their position that narrower accents don’t.
Ted Ross says accents should be two spaces wide, though his examples don’t look it. They should be “vertically aligned with the notehead”, though it’s unclear whether that means left or centred. His examples look centred. (p. 129).
Are we sure that accents didn’t become smaller and centred before computer engraving?
Yeah, I don’t think computer engraving had anything to do with it. Many of the classic notation texts like Read, Ross, and Stone all pre-date computer engraving and show centered accents.
Stone pg 5:
Read pg 264:
Ross pg 130:
EDIT: Rastall’s The Notation of Western Music shows them centered too on pg 198:
If some publishers’ house style is to left-align them, it does seem like a useful feature request to have Dorico support this though.
The Music Symbols editor won’t allow an X modification to be made for a single glyph, but if you input a blank space first, then you can modify the X offset for the next glyph. Below I used the Finale Engraver accent, which is a bit longer like some of the examples, and specified a 2.5 space X offset. It looks pretty much left-aligned to me.
Perhaps that would be a possible solution.
I said this was a common practice, but not a universal practice. E.g. Peters used wider accents, but centered. Other publishers used narrower accents.
Ted Ross described mostly the American practice, which was quite different from European. Computer engraving made the centered accents the default, effectively loosing the nuance.
All 4 of those notation books I cited were written before the computer notation era. The computer era may have continued that trend, but it pretty clearly was already the default style by the time notation software came to be widely used. Sticking with a strictly European guide, Helene Wanske I think is saying (in what is basically the Schott style guide) that either way is cool.
Did you try the Music Symbols edit? I didn’t try all the combinations, but it seemed pretty straightforward to get it to appear left-aligned.
EDIT: Chlapik has them centered in Die Praxis des Notengraphikers too.
Although he presents the option to have them centered on the stems rather than the notehead in divided parts.
Not sure if this is helpful or not but using Finale Maestro or the Sebastian fonts, the accent symbols are just a tad longer than what I have as default using Bravura font.
I know how to hack Dorico to achieve this style. I’m just requesting a native Engraving Option.
