When I have a halfnote starting on the second beat - why does the score editor sometimes show a halfnote and other times 2 tied quarter notes ?
Everything is heavily quantized (length too) and looks fine in the keyeditor.
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It isn’t a bug, if that is what you are wondering, and this is from Dorico. It is following the examples in Elaine Gould’s Behind Bars to the letter with the defaults. The general principle is to never obscure beat 3 in a 4/4 bar (so a half note on beat 2 should be represented as two tied quarters), except for the situation where the musical content of beat 1 and beat 4 are very simple (ex. a single quarter note each). So it follows this principle exactly. A quarter-half-quarter pattern is considered simple enough that the half note is shown as a half note, and more complicated patterns correctly show the two tied quarters. This is all fine in general. However there are some cases that are very close to this, like quarter-half-eighth-eighth, where it is not significantly more complicated than quarter-half-quarter. It unnecessarily shows the half as two tied quarters in these borderline situations.
You can go into the note grouping page of the notation settings to get some control over this. However I often find that changing these settings can cause it to err to much in the other direction, and not show the tie in situations where it would be more clear, so be careful about this.
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Thank’s @mducharme for this very precise explanation. I see the advantages, but will have a hard time explaining this to my 14 year old grandson, who just started playing music 
I make my settings in the grouping pane to have the syncopation I want, but they are not retained between launches of C15. I have to make the settings every time again opening a song. rather unworkable. same actually with cautionary accidentals.
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