In the last bar of the attachment, there is a crescendo to fff in each part. The crescendo hairpin appears normally in the parts that don’t have a dynamic at the start of the bar (Hn 3, Tpt 1&3, Tbn 1, Tba), but in the parts that enter mp the hairpin does not appear between the mp and the fff. According to the manual, hairpins have a minimum length of 3 spaces to ensure that are not too short. I have tried increasing the minimum length to as much as 6 spaces. This makes the bar wider, so the mp and fff are further apart, but the hairpins still remain hidden.
All the fff dynamics are ‘officially’ attached to the first beat of the next bar, which contains a rest, causing them to display in the previous bar. [Edit] If I insert them on the last semiquaver of the bar, the hairpins appear. They also appear if I insert a system break that causes the bar to become wider. So the problem can be worked around, but it is real.
Yeah, I have had the issue too. I’d love something like a setting that ensures that hairpins are drawn and respaces the bar to make that happen.
Thanks andgle. At least I know it’s on the radar.
In cases like this one may also enter the dynamics while the caret is active. E.g. do: shift-D and type mp< hit enter and use the right arrow to advance the caret to the end of the bar (make sure the grid, bottom left, is at a short notevalue) then type shift-D and type fff enter. This will widen the bar and make sure the hairpin is shown properly…
The only thing here that is different to what I do is entering the fff at a position within the bar rather than at the beginning of the next.
The problem will eventually be solved, when I finish the score, by casting off with few enough bars per system to allow space for the hairpin to appear.
Just wanted to weigh in and say I encountered this same issue in a score recently. I’m looking forward to improvements in this area.
Checking back in on this. I ran into this problem today when a half note had the dynamic mp<f. The hairpin was not visible in the score.
I decreased the hairpin minimum length to 1 space, which yielded strange results. The hairpin was visible, but very short. I then tried increasing it to 5 1/2 spaces, which did display the hairpin correctly. But when I increased it again to 6, the hairpin disappeared again. What’s the reason for that? And what are implications elsewhere in the score, if any, if increasing this value? Is there an ideal value to use in this case? Thanks.
The minimum length will affect the amount of rhythmic space Dorico will allocate for the hairpin, so you don’t really want to set it much larger than the default of 3 spaces, though it’s unlikely to make much difference unless you have short hairpins on very tightly-spaced music or on short note durations.
The problem is that it’s really hard to notice when these very short hairpins disappear because of note spacing, especially in a part. (At least in the score you have a hope of noticing a vertical inconsistency.) Maybe we could at least get a signpost appearing when they are accidentally hidden—until the note spacing algorithm can make sure it doesn’t happen.
Sorry to be dense, but I don’t entirely understand. Shouldn’t a minimum length of 3 spaces force the hairpin to occupy at least that amount of horizontal space, regardless of the tightness of the note spacing? If there is a minimum length setting, why would the hairpin be hidden at all?
We can’t easily show a signpost when they’re accidentally hidden, because we don’t know: Dorico is trying hard to ensure that they don’t get hidden, but failing.
The way that dynamics are positioned is very sophisticated, and involves a lot of decisions made both before, during and after the music is spaced. With processing that affects multiple phases of layout, there are complex interactions between those phases that can lead to situations where the result is not ideal, but decisions made earlier in processing dictate the final result. In short, it’s essentially a bug, and it is of course something we intend to fix in future.
Just ran through this problem which is affecting all my parts… I wish Dorico could make sure that hairpins are ALWAYS visible and have a minimum length (increasing that length in Engraving Options only seems to affect hairpins which are already visible).
Hello everyone, has been this problem solved? Or there is a relatively practical way of avoid it?
Thank you very much!
The problem has not yet been solved in Dorico 3.5, but we have recently been working on this internally and matters should be improved in the next version when it arrives.
In the meantime, you may find that reducing the minimum length for a hairpin on the Dynamics page of Engraving Options, coupled with slightly increasing the rhythmic spacing of that bar using the note spacing tool in Engrave mode is sufficient to resolve the problem.
Great! Thank you very much!
Has there been any movement on this problem? I’m having it in Dorico 4.2 frequently. Changing the minimum hairpin length and increasing the horizontal spacing of the affected bar doesn’t solve the problem. I’ve had to attach the dynamics to rhythmic positions to the right of where they should attach. Then the hairpins display.
But this makes the process of producing parts take longer, and it’s easy to overlook that the problem is occuring, meaning the mistakes in parts are likely.
John
No, this isn’t totally fixed as of 4.2.
I do find adding a manual note spacing change of something like 6 or 7 for only that section generally works.
Thanks, Dan. I’ll try that when I see it again.
John
I would be keen to see the actual project file(s) concerned here, so that we can assess why the work done on this in Dorico 4 has not addressed these situations.