I am creating some rhythm examples for teaching and would find it beneficial in this instance to have grid-like note spacing. Knowing that this is not the normal convention, is there a workaround that will achieve this nonetheless? I am having particular difficulty with lyrics, which in this case are being used to indicate counting subdivision. My post on the FB forum has not yielded any positive results yet and I would appreciate any tips. Below is the FB post and text pasted in here. Thank you.
Note spacing question: I am creating an exercise to show rhythmic similarities and would like to force the counting subdivision to be equal (proportional). The example on the left is what I want.
Note spacing is already set to 2.0 but that does not seem to have an effect, nor does unticking the “make space for lyrics” option.
You’d need to adjust the spacing ratio to 1, if you want everything to be even, regardless of rhythmic value, not 2.
Setting the spacing ratio to 2 and changing the minimum space for short notes so that it’s a quarter of the default space for quarter notes gets you pretty close, I believe. You can see the preview update as you tweak the settings, which gives you an indication of the minimum/default spaces allocated to notes of the corresponding duration.
Don’t forget the “Minimum space for short notes” value, which may have an effect.
This works! Thank you.
It seems that left-aligning lyrics is also needed. However, if I am not mistaken, there is no global preference for left-aligned lyrics, correct?
That’s right, there’s no global option because Dorico auto-updates the alignment of lyrics according to the context (in general, that means center-aligned for most lyrics, left-aligned for lyrics that span more than one note).
Deactivating “Make space for lyrics” in Layout Options > Note Spacing will also stop Dorico factoring in lyrics when calculating horizontal spacing, but might result in lyric collisions.
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