FR: turn off collision avoidance for Instrument change labels

Dorico
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I’d like to put in a feature request to allow more control over the positioning of instrument change labels through the properties panel. Specifically, I’d like to be able to turn off collision avoidance, and/or hide an individual label, in order to avoid situations like this:

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Vertical spacing gets blown up in these situations, but moving the label in Engrave mode doesn’t resolve this. Manually fixing the spacing is a hassle I’d rather avoid. Other things I’ve considered:

  • Reduce the offset of the rehearsal mark from the systemic barline
    ==> is an Engraving option so that would affect every layout, which I absolutely don’t want
  • Hide the label and replace it with staff text
    ==> not possible. The only way to hide the label is entering a space for custom text, but that doesn’t resolve the vertical spacing.
  • Hiding all instrument change labels for this layout and adding them manually as text items
    ==> A Finale flashback that I’d like to avoid as well, especially because this piece has multiple percussion parts with up to 10 instruments per player.

So right now I’m resorting to adding a hidden grace note at the start of such a bar but I really wish that wasn’t necessary (also open to better ideas). Thanks for bearing with me!

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I usually turn off all vertical collision avoidance in the parts to prevent Dorico from adding space between systems. It is much easier to add more space if needed than to remove unwanted space. There are other scenarios that result in similar issues - ex. dynamics below a staff and a rehearsal marker above the lower staff.

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Thanks for the tip! Now that you mention it I do recall having read forum posts about people doing this. I’ll give it a try. Though it doesn’t feel like a very Doricoesque thing to do. :smiley:

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It doesn’t to me either. I’m hoping one of these days they will figure out a way to allow the space to be calculated based on the current positions of the items instead of based on their default position. That issue is the one little thing that I feel like was a step backwards when I moved from Sibelius to Dorico years ago, with pretty much everything else being a huge step forwards.

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