Of those 8 slurs, I would say that only 2 look about right. The problem seems to stem (haha) from the grace notes of flute 2 pointing down (when condensed) instead of up (when not condensed), while the main notes of flute 1 are pointing up (when condensed) instead of pointing down (when not condensed).
Is there something I can do (besides manually going over them one by one) to improve the situation? This is a vanilla Dorico project with most of the options being on their factory settings, nothing crazy added by me.
No, in general there are no settings you can change that will produce ideal slur contours from grace notes to main notes in every situation. There are many previous discussions about this on the forum, including one just a day or two ago, but although you may be able to achieve a better appearance in some situations, you will almost certainly not find a set of values in Engraving Options that completely obviate the need for graphical tweaking.
Sorry I missed the discussion from 2 days ago. (I had set search to sort by relevance, and the most recent result that came up was from end of 2023…)
Please let me add this as a feature request then: All examples in Engraving Options regarding slurs and grace notes only have regular notes in their pictures, with the slurs going from the grace note directly to the note head of the main note. Now, I find that grace notes do behave totally differently when there are other things involved, like articulations.
When you take a quick look at the last bar of my screenshot in the original posts, you see that those notes have tenutos, and the slur wants to connect to a point outside the tenuto.
When I remove the tenuto, I get this:
Now the slurs (especially the top one) already look way better. Maybe we could use some more options here - but I guess, you already have this topic on your (loooong) backlog
In this case, I think I would try some sort of explicit manual condensing using shared stems, i.e. ‘a2’ where the flutes are in unison, and ‘chords’ in seemingly one voice where they’re homophonic. I wonder why the automatic condensing didn’t do that by itself, though. Is there maybe a dynamic or articulation slightly different in the two voices? We’d need the actual project to examine…
