How to control the length of ties at the beginning of lines?

[high5ths]

This is sort of a two-part observation. I know we have hundreds of settings for ties — I love them so much, Daniel! — but I can’t find a way to control the length of ties at the start of a system. I need those ties to be slightly larger.

I expected to do this in Spacing Gaps, by slightly increasing the “Leading Space” of a line (the spacing between the initial clef, key signature, or meter—whichever comes last—and the note, rest, or repeat barline that follows—whichever comes first). But there doesn’t seem to be a Spacing Gap for that, nor a ties preference for minimum length at the start of a system.

Here are the places I have looked so far:

I tried increasing the Spacing Gap after the initial clef, but that doesn’t seem to affect the first note of the line. (It pushes out a time signature or a key signature after the clef, but not the first note.)

Raising the “Ideal gap after barline” will give me the space/look I need, but at the expense of space after every barline in the score—not good.

I also tried the other spacing gap values, just in case, to no avail.

In Engraving Options:Ties, we have minimum length settings for ties between notes, between grace notes/normal notes, and for L.V. ties, but not for this case. (Those settings don’t change anything here.) We have a preference the gap between a tie and the end of a system, but I don’t see anything controlling the minimum length of a tie at the start of a system.

Am I missing something? Thanks.

(Attached is an incredibly simple test case.)
MinimumTieCase.dorico.zip (402 KB)

[Bollen]

It appears it can only be done manually at the moment (Engrave Mode > Note Spacing), unless like you say “sacrifice the distance of non-tied notes”

[dspreadbury]

Unfortunately there are as yet no options for partial ties at the start of the system; similar problems exist with e.g. glissando lines as well. This is also why you cannot automatically show a cautionary accidental on a tied note that continues over a system break. The reason for this is that at the moment Dorico does all of the processing related to ties before it spaces and casts off the score, so it doesn’t “know” that a tie has ended up split by a system break. We need to add some extra processing phases to make it possible to influence these things, and this is on our backlog.

[high5ths]

Ah, yes, I remember you talking about the issues with beginning-of-line gliss. lines. If we could (someday) get another spacing gap preference that would just deal with beginning-of-line “first note” distance (the spacing between the initial clef, key signature, or meter—whichever comes last—and the note, rest, or repeat barline that follows—whichever comes first), that would also cover this scenario.