The flats are hovering above the preceding notes in this example, but the staff is not overcrowded (it’s a mock up so don’t mind the actual notes here - this occurs when a note above the staff has a flat and is at least a fourth above the preceding note). I understood from various forum posts that Dorico likes to space these things as tightly as possible, which is generally great, but I’m not a fan of those flats violating the preceding notes’ airspace if there is enough room on the staff.
Is there any global setting I can use to give those flats some more space? I’ve tried playing with just about all of the Accidental settings in Engraving options, but those only seem to affect accidentals that are within the staff. Note that Dorico does create extra space for a sharp in that situation, which is of course to prevent collision of the sharp’s decender with the preceding notehead, but I’d like to be able to give similar space to flats.
Am I looking at some old fashioned manual nudging in Engrave mode here, or is there a setting that I’m missing? I also noticed the Accidental column setting in the Properties panel, but that only seems to affect the position of that B flat’s top ledger line… Thanks in advance!
There is no engraving option for this. Dorico will always prioritise the rhythmic spacing if possible, and won’t allow the spacing to become distorted unless it has to.
But that doesn’t affect the flats in my example above. I assumed this was because there is no object (notehead, articulation etc.) to the immediate left of the flat sign. But that doesn’t explain this:
Gap to left of leftmost accidental set to 2 spaces for illustration
Apparently, the first note of a bar is affected by that setting, even if there is nothing at all to the immediate left of the accidental, while an accidental that ends up within the column of the preceding note remains unaffected. If Dorico doesn’t have to move the B-flat above, surely there is no reason to move the A-flat? I’m not trying to fight a design choice here, but I’m trying to understand why a setting that has the specific purpose of overriding Dorico’s default spacing choices, does so in most situations but not all.
A side effect of this whole mechanism occurs when you need to introduce a playing techinque in the space above the preceding note:
If the note needs a flat, the preceding mute symbol is being pushed up. I think it’s hardly debatable that Dorico should prioritize the correct placement of the PT before rhythmic spacing in this situation.
The reason that the Gap to left of leftmost accidental option works differently for the first note in a bar than it does elsewhere comes down to precisely how Dorico’s spacing works.
At the start of the bar, there is some inviolable space to the right of the barline, and you can imagine that there is an invisible barrier that nothing can cross. This barrier is “infinitely tall”, so it extends both above and below the staff. The leftmost accidental then pushes against this infinitely tall barrier, and that’s what causes it to move two spaces to the right.
However, when the note with the accidental is being spaced against the previous note, there is no infinitely tall barrier in play: instead, Dorico is using a bounding shape that reasonably precisely follows the contour of the previous notehead and its stem. In the area directly above the notehead, there is nothing for the flat to push against, so Dorico doesn’t need to distort the spacing. If the note were one staff position higher, then the flat and the notehead would interact, and the note and its accidental would be pushed to the right.
Dorico doesn’t “know” that the previous note will end up with a playing technique when it is spacing the music, and the playing technique is positioned after the music has been spaced. This means that the playing technique has no choice but to go above the accidental. (At this stage, Dorico similarly doesn’t “know” that it is positioning the playing technique outside an accidental belonging to the following note or chord: it is working with a “skyline” profile and positioning the playing technique against that.)
I would agree that in this case you would definitely want to prioritise the playing technique above the accidental belonging to the following note, but at the moment that isn’t something Dorico can do.
