Pretty much what the title says: in a run of single notes, particularly with many accidentals, is it possible to disable the automatic kerning/tucking of notes following large leaps? The issue I’m running into here is that in an effort to save space, particularly in tight spacing, Dorico will borrow space from adjacent notes and overlap one note’s accidental with another notehead. However, this often makes the passage look much more cramped and messy because the noteheads and stems are no longer a consistent distance apart from each other.
Digging through the various options, the two that seem to have an effect on this behavior are the “Minimum space for short notes” setting in Layout Options > Note Spacing and the “Minimum distance between adjacent rhythmic items” setting in Engraving Options > Spacing gaps; however, both of these settings apply globally, and therefore will interfere with the spacing of notes where these issues do not present themselves. In an oooooold thread, Daniel suggests that the “Gap to left of leftmost accidental” setting might help here, but much like the OP of that thread, changing that value only affects the spacing between a notehead and adjacent accidental that are not being kerned and it does not affect notes and accidentals that are being kerned.
Here are a couple of screenshots: the top one is what my current output is by default and the bottom one is what my desired output would be (it’s not 100% accurate, but it’s as close as I could get by eyeballing it):
Is there any way to disable automatic kerning of noteheads?
Hi @ryanpetriello, generally you should have a look at the system fullness indicators (visible in Engrave mode): if the fullness of a system is below 100% the automatic spacing should be satisfactory (you can fine-tune the various gaps in Engraving options>Accidentals, or as you said, the Note Spacing, both globally or just for a particular passage, with a Note Spacing Change).
When the system fullness increases, the spacing will suffer more and more, and if it is bigger then 100%, then the spacing starts to fall apart. This is expected behaviour (see the screenshot where I forced more and more bars in a system):
So one fast method would be (beside to a different casting-off) to reduce slightly the Space Size, or increase slightly the L and R page margins (Layout Options>Page Setup), so the system fullness stays below 100%.
But probably someone will suggest something else/better
This is happening when the fullness indicators are below 100% (around 95–99% I believe, I’ll be able to confirm that later), but I’m also using different Note Spacing values from the factory ones: 3.5 spaces for quarter notes and a spacing ratio of 1:1.5 instead of 4 and 1:1.41.
I admit I had entirely forgotten about my thread that @charles_piano linked to above, but the mocked up example that I posted there was at 94.7% fullness (back in Dorico 5).
I also wish there were more preferences around this – I don’t mind a little kerning, but I find Dorico’s default too extreme and very unharmonious-looking. It’s one of things I manually adjust every time.
