Lower staff spacing has changed

I just updated to Dorico 4.1. It seems that something has changed with how staff spacing is handled. With the same settings, the lower staff in an SATB Condensed set of braced staffs is much further from the lyrics than in previous versions.

Previous version results:

New version results:

The braced staff spacing is set to 11 1/2, and lyrics are set to be a minimum of 3 spaces from the staff. I did fined that reducing the “Minimum inter-staff gap with content” from 1 to 0 improved the spacing, but that’s all I’ve been able to find.

Any ideas?

Yes, there are changes to the way lyrics work - see pages 9 and 10 of the Version History; the section on Lyrics.

Your comparison doesn’t appear to be fair, though, as the second example has the letter “p” (in “triumph”) immediately above an up-stem, which is probably forcing extra space below.

I agree that it’s not a perfect example. However, I am seeing the same effect on all the staves.

Thanks for the pointer. I’ll check it out.

I saw this in the notes:

Because lyrics are now drawn with paragraph styles, they can have a different size
in full score and part layouts if desired.

Yes! Fantastic! I was hoping something like this would be done at some point.

Edit: I just realized that this only affects size. It would be great if there could be entirely different styles. If I’m using the full score, it’s usually for the keyboard player’s reference while the part is for slides. Both have very different font needs.

Because hymnals are almost always pretty tight, I’m running into this with almost every old file I open for editing. But I see it as a needed change for the long term, and it’s a relatively easy fix.

The most reliable way I’ve found at this point is to change Engraving Options—Lyrics to reduce the space between the staff and the lyric slightly.

Reduce the Staff spacing to a smaller number. Dorico will still avoid collisions, if needed. I typically use staff spacings of between 5 and 8.

Your text is pretty large, compared to the music. It would still be very readable down 1pt.

For reference: this is for slides, which is why the text is so large.

I found that reducing the leading to 83% in the paragraph dialog fixed most of the spacing problem.

Result:

Thanks so much for the help, gentlemen!