Hi,
I would like to have all my beams flat. I have choosen all engrave options for beams to “force horizontal”, and all slants to 0, but I still get some beams not exactly horizontal… I know that I can change them to flat with the “beam direction” property, but I would like to know if this is a bug or just intended this way. I enclose an example:
Thank you in advanced!
You can’t force all beams to be completely horizontal by way of Engraving Options; although you can express a desire for a 0-space slant, Dorico will still end up snapping each end of the beam to valid positions under some circumstances, which can result in a non-zero slant.
Thank you Daniel, I will use the flat beam property for these cases, then.
I use flat beams throughout for my scores. Why can’t we make them all flat, as desired, without some corner case exceptions?
Single ‘horizontal beams’ button would be all we need.
Should this be a feature request? It’s very common in modernist scores. It’s not Common Era practice, but it is valid and frequent. There appear to be quite a few requests for this in the forum.
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You can’t make them all flat at present because the software is not designed specifically to allow that. Hopefully you will not find it too arduous to make all beams flat, which you can do by way of:
- Edit > Select All.
- Edit > Filter > Notes and Chords.
- If you have tuplets in your project: Edit > Filter > Deselect Only, Edit > Filter > Tuplets.
- In the Properties panel, set Beam direction to Flat.
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But why not a feature request? I can do this in Lilypond with a simple command (not that I intend to continually compare the two, but just saying…)
Daniel did say “at present”…
Maybe if no request it won’t be considered? After all, it’s not there now. Perhaps if nobody asks it will never be implemented? Would be good to have.
This forum didn’t have a tagging system for feature requests until the move to Discourse last year. It’s not a formal system, though - the development team have their own order of priorities, and have certainly been known to implement requested features without publicly acknowledging the requests.
I’ve used my magic powers to add a feature-request tag to this thread, but you can always do so yourself (on your other threads) if it makes you happy.
Thanks. Very good to know.
Daniel’s ability to log, remember, ruminate on, and oversee the development of features / amendments based on user feedback is truly beyond human comprehension. The man is a marvel (as is the whole team).
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Instead of depending on one person’s memory, speaking as software architect myself, would it not be better to have a feature request register/database/etc? Using Discourse posts is not a good way of tracking user requests in my view. It is not what it is intended for (I run several Discourse forums.)
And advantage of this would be that people could browse to see if a feature has already been requested, saving duplication.
This interests me because having come from years of full time Lilypond engraving, there are a lot of things I’d like to see, and I am missing badly already. Sorry to be so annoying! [Lilypond engravers are as annoying as ex-smokers!]
So, feature request - implement a feature request tracking system. 
Thankfully this Discourse forum is not the tracking system for feature requests. It’s just the one that happens to be exposed to us users.
I got the impression from Lillie’s post it is in Daniel’s memory. 
Not at all. Daniel has made mention several times of keeping track of these sorts of things elsewhere. I’m sure there’s plenty of internal organization none of us users see. How else could the team develop the software as quickly as they have?
Very good. Thanks! Understood.
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Yes my comment was more rhetorical than specific!
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I’ve followed these instructions, but the option doesn’t show in the Properties panel.
Select All > Filter Notes and Chords > Deselect Only > Filter Tuplets
I’ve verified that tuplets get deselected.
What was needed was also to Deselect Grace Notes, or the Beam direction will not appear.
The list of items shown in the Filter menu is specific to the selection of objects you are filtering. If your selection includes grace notes, then grace notes will appear in that list. If it does not, then it will not appear.