Greetings dev. team,
I noticed something odd today: when notes are set to hide stems, the stem direction seem to still be affecting note alignment. This really threw me for a loop and I couldn’t figure out why my noteheads wouldn’t line up. Then I tried pressing ‘f’ on a hunch, and sure enough, flipping the non-existent stem solved the problem.
This happened because originally, when stems were still displayed, the upper voice had its stem forced down so as to not intersect lyrics. When I decided that stemless notation would be preferable, I simply hid the stems, expecting everything to pop into place. It was only when I noticed a few minutes later that things were not aligned that I diagnosed this behavior. So, please consider it a FR to have the stem spacing/direction ignored when the stem is hidden.
In the gif below, all I’m doing is pressing ‘f’ repeatedly.
EDIT: and just to clarify, the behavior is the same whether or not the lower note has a stem. Initially I discovered this issue when they were both stemless, and fearing some weird data issue, I deleted the original note, and re-entered it, hence the stem appears in this gif. This file is also original to 4.0.10 and not an import of any kind.
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Does the behaviour change if you shorten the stems (in Engrave mode) before hiding them? My thinking is that the length of the invisible stem is being taken into account when calculating collision avoidance and that if it is short enough it might not collide - I hope that makes sense.
I’m sure that is the case.
The problem is there’s absolutely no reason to do that when you know you’ll be hiding the stems.
It is a complete quirk that I discovered this, and in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter much, since it’s quite rare when you’d run up against this. But since everything else in dorico is so semantic, it seems to me this should be too (in the due course of time).
Yes, stem direction is taken into account in a number of processing phases regardless of whether the note physically shows a stem. It would add a decent amount of complexity to ensure this is taken into account in every conceivable situation, so while I don’t disagree that in an ideal world it should, it’s unlikely to be something that we work on in the near future.
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If nothing else, I know it’s on your radar now, and perhaps this thread will help someone else in the future. I completely understand this not being a priority.
(It should be considered no small degree of testament, that I do stemless notation almost every single day and this is the very first time in four years of using dorico that I have bumped up against it.)