Horizontal displacement & alignment of notes between voices

Two parts to this question :

  1. Last week I found a set of three settings for adjusting Dorico’s preferences in displacing notes horizontally (when laying out voices).

Now I just can’t find those settings again. (Agh!! :face_with_head_bandage:) I’ve looked in notation and engrave options; unfortunately the only word I can think of is alignment. That occurs so many times in the help PDF. Where are those settings? I’m sure I didn’t imagine them.

  1. Secondly (last week ) I set all those settings to zero so that theoretically every chord should now be vertically aligned but I find that even if I have a chord which does not require horizontal displacement (i.e. All intervals of at least a third ), I see unnecessary horizontal displacements between voices (Which make the music very hard to read ).

(Once I have the answer to part one I can send an example :grinning:)

I can fix unnecessary horizontal displacements in engrave options individually but I should not have to do that, or should I? . Dorico is so good in terms of layout that now I am spoiled! - (in my Finale days I just accepted it as inevitable that huge time would be wasted moving stuff about pixel by pixel.)

Are you wanting Notation Options>Voices?

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Yes thank you. That must be the section I was looking for but the only part which has numbers in seems to be the alignment of slash voices.

I can see now, however, that I haven’t got all my alignment options set as I expected, which no doubt why I’m getting an unexpected result :slightly_smiling_face:

So: is there any way to avoid this type of mis alignment automatically. I’d like the the crotchet tails overlap?

Same mis alignment also occurs for semibreves, where there are no visible tails.

(The note heads will line up if the green part is tails up, this is the curse of guitar notation, often in four parts but the world only has two : viz: ‘up’ and ‘down’).

You might try reducing the various setting in Engraving Options > Notes > Voices for the distance between notes in different voices.

Otherwise, you’ll have to set the blue notes to Voice Column 0 in Engrave mode’s Properties panel.

However, it’s fairly standard engraving practice to see notes in different voices separated in this way.

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In that bar 96, I would select the green voice notes and press F. Sometimes, when things are complicated, the engraver can take decisions :wink:
It’s actually quite rare in piano parts that I don’t have to flip some notes. It’s the very nature of those instruments.

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is the ‘magic’ I was so fruitlessly searching :confounded: for this morning. (My music example comes from a different work) . Setting everything to ‘0’ fixes it for crotchets and minims( but possibly not for semibreves).

So what I think of as "alignment" is actually set up in both

  • Engraving Options > Notes > Voices
  • and
  • Notation Options>Voices

I fully appreciate that this is a very complex piece of functionality but may be the documentation could be a little improved to cross reference the two sections.

Reading through the Dorico help pdf is one of my pieces of bed time reading. It has helped.