I’m curious if someone can help explain what’s happening here with the grace note spacing. Bar 61 beat 2 and bar 62 beat 3 are too close but can be changed globally. But what is with the a to f# on the and of 2 in bar 62? Why is the spacing so wide? There are no manual spacing adjustments and the dynamics appear to be attached to the main notes. I am open to suggestions. This current piece is filled with similar phrases and I can’t find a setting that works often enough to prevent an absolute tweak-fest.
Thanks!
EDIT TO ADD: the only other instrument playing here has a half note in b. 62
Can you please attach the project itself? Unfortunately it’s not really possible to diagnose these kinds of things from pictures. I refer you to this sticky post:
You should be able to cut down the project to just a few bars and attach that.
thanks for taking the time to reply. Here is a cut-down file that demonstrates the issue in the flute staff. I had set a relatively large minimum gap after the last grace note to avoid collisions. But I notice in looking at the note spacing grid; in places where they are too close (for example the f# grace notes in the first few measures of this example) there is a second selection handle that doesn’t do anything. Deleting and reentering them also doesn’t seem to help. This was entered by hand - not as an xml import - but I was still learning the program (as I still am!) so pilot error cannot be ruled out.
In the end, I don’t think there’s anything untoward going on here: Minimum distance between rightmost grace note and rhythmic item (in the Grace Notes section of the Notes page of Engraving Options) is set to 1/2 space, and that plus the 1/8 space gap to the left of the sharp accidental, plus the fact that the grace note is diagonally above and to the left of the accidental means that optically it ends up looking further away than it should ideally be. Dorico’s not clever enough as yet to close up this gap automatically, so you’ll need to give it a hand using the note spacing tools in Engrave mode.
I appreciate you taking the time to take a look and reply. I still contend that something isn’t right. Entering the same bars into a fresh project has different spacing - yes the a to f# appears to be wider than the others for the reasons you mentioned but certainly not enough that I would nudge each one.
In the test project I had attached, if you set the minimum distance to something ridiculously small, you’ll see that some grace notes collide and others don’t. In looking at the ones that do collide in the note spacing grid, you’ll notice an extra ‘ghost’ selection handle (in the screenshot beat 2 of the first bar, beat 3 of the second bar):
I’ve attached the same project with the settings changed and the f# raised to c# for the sake of comparison.
As I mentioned, I am just trying to get them to appear more or less uniform as there are a ton of similar phrases in this piece.
Thanks again! Sorry to be a pain!
The extra spacing handles in Engrave mode are caused by the dynamics, which I think you have starting and ending at grace note positions in a couple of cases. I’d avoid doing that if possible, since it can certainly cause some spacing unevenness as Dorico tries to ensure that the dynamics are spaced properly.
The other differences are I think accounted for by the differences between whether the grace notes are beamed (in which case they don’t take up any additional space to the right of the notehead) or unbeamed (in which case the width of the flags will be taken into account).
yes, your right (naturally!). Sorting out the dynamic attachment points gets me the expected results. Still a lot of tweaking but at least then I can rely on automatic spacing rather than manual.
Thanks!
