Note heads offset from staff lines

Hi,

I have started to use Dorico Pro 3.5.11.1054 (Win 10) a few weeks ago and find that the note heads are drawn with a few pixels of wrong offset vs. staff lines at most zoom levels.

Here is an example at 200% zoom where the note heads are off by a few pixels:
dorico note heads

At some zoom levels it shows correctly. This is at 400%:
dorico note heads 400

Is there something in Dorico’s preferences that affects this? Or is this a bug?

Thanks!

It is likely an incompatibility between your screen resolution and certain magnifications of the music. It should not affect printing.

Yes printing is fine but this incorrect note head offset makes it rather difficult to work with dense scores.

I don’t get this with Cubase’s score editor or other notation software.

I am working on a 4K screen with 100% scaling setting in Windows 10 meaning that the dpi scaling is not the problem.

Is this “expected” with Dorico’s screen rendering?

No, definitely NOT expected behavior! And in that first example, it’s not just noteheads. The repeat dots are off as well.

Please check what version of Bravura you have installed on your system. I believe it should be 1.39.

Thanks dankreider, I checked and I do have Bravura version 1.39 installed.

One thing I now have also noticed is that Dorico’s GUI has everything in the various panel icons also shifted be a few pixels. For example this is the lower left corner panel with the various view settings and you can see it has pixels missing of the icon content as they are shifted lower and right:
dorico icons

Another example is the engraving notehead settings window which has the noteheads also shifted from the staff line:

So it seems that this is a Dorico bug (at least in relation to my OS / system configuration) as I have no other software on my system with similar GUI issues?

I’m afraid somebody smarter than me is going to need to weigh in. All I can say is that this is pretty unusual, and it’s probably something having to do with your system settings, although I can’t say for sure. I’ve never seen that before.

Thanks dankreider. Maybe somebody from the Dorico team will chime in.

I have a similar issue when I used a custom notehead. It only looked wrong on my full HD monitor though, not on my Retina display.

@greennotes, is it possible that you’re running with ClearType disabled? Can you please try switching it on?

Thanks dspreadbury, switching ClearType on has now fixed it!

I normally have ClearType switched off as I dislike Window’s ClearType subpixel text font rendering and prefer the higher contrast and non-aliased look with ClearType off.

I assume there is no way to use Dorico with ClearType disabled and not have this x/y offset issue? I have not run into similar issues with any other software on my system (the font appearance is obviously different with ClearType disabled but the x/y positioning would normally not change)?

I’m afraid you will need to use ClearType to get good sub-pixel positioning, yes.

Thanks @dspreadbury, I will use Dorico with ClearType enabled.

If anybody else bumps into this issue, I am now using a small utility called " Better ClearType Tuner" that allows me to quickly toggle ClearType on/off before/after using Dorico so I can keep ClearType disabled on my system unless using Dorico.