Note spacing for chant

I’ve been using Dorico to typeset chant for sung liturgies. Dorico’s support for open meter makes this a delight, and Daniel’s tutorial on preces and responses has been particularly helpful.

My question is about an issue with note spacing that sometimes comes up. To be concrete, I’ve attached a particularly extreme example from the collect “Lighten our darkness …”: in the third bar, there’s a breve at the far left of the line with the lyric “through Jesus Christ our sav-”, and the concluding “-ior” is quite far to the right, attached to a crotchet.

I find this hard to read. I would prefer for “sav-” and “-ior” to be close together, with the blank space at the end of the bar.

I can of course adjust the note spacing by hand, but it would require many painstaking adjustments to do so consistently across an entire project, and it would seem to violate the Dorico principle of setting good rules and avoiding manual adjustments. Is there a setting I haven’t found that would help me?

Instead of using the “indivdually-notey-movey” Note Spacing, you could use Note Spacing Change (Engrave menu) on the breve, and then a Reset on the black note.

See this tip for details:

And/Or add extra hidden rests at the end of the line.

Depending how much of a purist you are, you could add a black note on the chanting tone to accommodate the first syllable of savior.

You could probably get away with also reducing the normal amount allotted for that note in the note spacing options (globally, I mean). If the option to create automatic space for lyrics is enabled, the end notes would likely shift out of the way, even if you minimized the space you allot for the long notes.