How to appropriately center beam cross staff chords?

See the attached picture.


My issue is that when a center beamed cross staff chord is made, it breaks the positioning of the notehead on the stem. for one of the staves. Flipping breaks it the other way. Forced center beam doesn’t seem to work in this situation. I tried finding a jank solution like I would in Sibelius, but there doesn’t seem to be an obvious way. Am I missing something?

Is this what you wanted? (I’m using Dorico Pro 4.)

Center beam cross staff

I entered the dotted eighth notes in the upper staff in a downstem voice and the dotted eighth notes in the lower staff in an upstem voice. I entered the tuplet notes in the lower staff, beamed them separately from the dotted eighth notes, crossed the notes in the second and fourth parts of the tuplet to the staff above, and forced the centered beam. I then selected all of these notes and beamed them together.

The Oxford Companion to Music says that accarezzevole should be spelled with one r and two zs.

I’ll give that a try, though I wish that the stems line up on the dotted 8th; maybe that is possible. Nice catch on the spelling, yet another reason Dorico should add spellcheck when creating text, or a mode that checks spelling.

You can move the dotted eighth notes in the upper staff to the right using note spacing in engrave mode, but the whole notes will also move with them.

Yeah. I have come across the limitations of Dorico’s Engrave mode.

I have unfortunately come across the limitations of Dorico’s Engrave mode.

The limitation is that Dorico does not handle a stem that extends on both sides of a beam.

The closest I could get was:

Cross-staff.dorico (466.7 KB)

To even up the spacing, the 2nd and 4th notes in the quintuplet can be moved to the right using the Note Spacing tool in Engrave mode - select and move the circular edit handle which appears when you click on the square edit handle for a note. You could also experiment with Voice column index to see if the vertical alignment changes to be closer to what you want. Depending on what other notation will follow, you might want/need to remove extraneous rests.

You can also even up the spacing in the quintuplet by activating “Use optical spacing for beams between staves” in the Note Spacing category of Layout Options.

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I opted for a different solution.