I’m running into an odd problem in engrave mode. When I attempt to manually adjust dynamics in a part layout, doing so sometimes shifts the staff spacing. This behavior seems to be random, although it sometimes seems to take place in relation to a rehearsal mark (though not in the example below).
I thought moving dynamics in Engrave mode would never change the staff spacing. Has anyone experienced this? Am I missing something?
I’ve seen this a few times, though I didn’t think about it much because the result was conveniently the same as if I had corrected the staff spacing manually. 
In my experience, this always happens with hairpins and with text dynamics like cresc. and dim. but with nothing else. It is curiously inconsistent but, as Florian wrote, also convenient, as correcting staff spacing takes a lot more work to make visually consistent. Sometimes it’d be handy if it worked for other musical elements, as well, but perhaps that goes against the Dorico philosophy.
Here’s a project demonstrating the issue. If I move the hairpin at m. 69-70, it shifts the staves.
In this case, that’s what I don’t want it to do. The staves are set exactly as I want them, and I just want to adjust the dynamic.
Psalm 84.zip (434 KB)
Sorry to take a while to follow up on this one. Just to say that, for the time being, this is actually the designed behaviour, though it’s something that we plan to change in a future version. In general, as you know, we take the view that the calculated position for an item will be used for the purposes of determining staff separation, and any user-supplied offset is then not taken into consideration, but gradual dynamics are presently an exception to this general rule. We have discussed this internally several times over the past few years and although we’ve gone around on it, I expect that we will change it in due course.
Thanks Daniel.
I am looking forward to that adjustment, too. Best wishes.
Any news about this?
The lower staff still moves along with dynamics in Engrave mode (Dorico 3.5) and it’s cumbersome to get around.
No, there’s no news on this, I’m afraid, and at the time of writing this is not something we have yet implemented in your development builds.
Any news on this feature? I have wasted quite a bit of time trying to get around this behavior, unsuccessfully.
I’m afraid this is something we have yet to return to, sorry.