Automatic respelling produces the following:
(Default dialog box settings, though I tried many permutations and it doesn’t change the result. This is on a new, default solo piano project.)
My questions:
Am I crazy to think that the preferred outcome should be:
Hi @tenfour,
here my thoughts about the automatic respelling of your example (this is how I interpret what Dorico is doing, and I may be wrong of course):
Dorico calculates the automatic respelling based on musical context. You have only two notes in Eb major or C minor: so this is a very short context for Dorico to “make decisions”:
Let’s say you are in Eb major here. The Ab is the 4^ and the Bbb would be its neighbour note (5^-), so remaining in the same key and showing the melodic movement [EDIT: contour, as @pianoleo better describes this].
Your desired Ab-A natural would imply a modulation (even if a short one, for example as double dominant leading note), so Dorico chooses, for this very short context, to remain in the same tonality.
I suspect it’s just that Dorico’s aiming to show the contour of the line. Do remember that (at least by default) Dorico reserves the right to automatically respell retrospectively, after you’ve input the next note, so a sample of two notes isn’t necessarily worth focusing on.
I chose the above example as a minimally reproducible example for clarity. I am encountering this issue quite a bit in a large project (it REALLY wants to spell as B𝄫 instead of A♮). It’s interesting to see your ideas on what’s happening here, it’s more understandable now from that perspective.
Is there a way to influence or configure these behaviors/heuristics? The dream would be if Dorico also considers chord symbols in its respelling 
. In my case one of the reasons B𝄫 feels so awkward is that the chord is an F7(♯9).
Oh, I see. If the next note is back to Ab, then Bbb would be correct. If the next note is Bb, the A natural would be correct.