Note spacing in tight quarters again

[John_Ruggero]

I have been successful (I think) using Note Spacing Change generally, but am still having to do a lot of hand work when it comes to accidentals and ledger lines in tightly packed areas. An example:

1. Note spacing setting of 4 (long notes) and 1 3/5 (short notes):
   

   

2. Changed to 1 and 1. Accidentals still overlap and last measure compressed:
   

   

3. Changed to 1 1/2 and 1. Better spacing, but accidentals still overlap.
   

   

4. There is enough room to make it work, but with a lot of adjusting. (The ledger lines still need shortening)
   

   

I would like to avoid 4. and hoping that better values entered into the Note Spacing Change would keep the accidentals from overlapping the notes. Or is 3. the best that one can expect in tight quarters?

[Janus]

Looks like you are generally trying to squash too much into a system. Perhaps time to reduce space size… hence use smaller notes?

[John_Ruggero]

Thank you @Janus. I know it’s too full, but unfortunately solo piano music sometimes requirers this kind of thing for the sake of page turns. (Most editions do this passage this way since it’s pretty hard to do any other way.) I do resort to smaller note size at times, but the passage works OK without resorting to that and just with hand adjustment.

I am just wondering if Dorico can compress as necessary without accidentals (and perhaps even ledger lines) overlapping.

[dan_kreider]

As someone who regularly deals with extremely tight spacing mysaelf, I’d say you’ve reached the limit of what you can do without manual adjustment.

[John_Ruggero]

Thanks @dan_kreider It’s not a big deal to hand adjust, since Dorico has very nice controls, but I just want to be sure I am not wasting time.

Here is the result with ledger lines done etc.:

Reducing note size just a little as suggested by Janus is also tempting as a way to clarify it a little more.

[Janus]

@John_Ruggero

Most editions do this passage this way since it’s pretty hard to do any other way

I’m sorry, but basic Newtonian physics applies. Make the dots smaller, else put fewer dots on the line.

[John_Ruggero]

@Janus Yes, the Bravura note heads I’m using are quite full and do need a little reduction at times.

[Derrek]

Would using the “Default” noteheads rather than the larger Bravura noteheads avoid the necessity to use a smaller space size?

[John_Ruggero]

Thanks @Derrek The smaller noteheads are definitely a possibility, but I do prefer the larger ones on most cases. And one can tailor the reduction to the situation with the percent controls.

Here is the passage without intervention in Finale using Maestro note heads at the normal size of 24 pt. with my usual settings. I also tried it with Maestro Wide and the result was practically the same. The accidentals don’t overlap the noteheads, but the ledger lines will require a lot of intervention since Finale doesn’t have a means of shortening ledger lines on a local basis:

Dorico seems to require more room than Finale. Perhaps the note heads and a bunch of settings that I need to change.

Oops. I see I omitted a couple of right hand chords in the first 4 examples. I will leave it as is since it doesn’t have any effect on the result.

[pianoleo]

Comparing your final two examples at the same size, it’s clear that it’s the ledger lines in 131 (even after youo’ve manually tweaked them) that are what take up the space in Dorico.

Obviously this isn’t a fair test, as you’ve tweaked the Dorico ones and not the Finale ones, but if you tweaked the Finale ones I guess they couldn’t take up less space than you have in Dorico, here, and still be legible.

[John_Ruggero]

Thank you for looking at that closely @pianoleo That is also what I concluded. The lack of local ledger line control in Finale is one of the reasons I am now using Dorico. In Finale I would have substituted a special note head font that takes care of such situations. I much prefer being able to tweak them by hand in Dorico.

Judging from what I have seen, engravers have used such tweaking for a very long time as a way of handling this. They even tweaked single ledger lines so that one might be longer than another on the same note, something that is as yet not possible in Dorico, as far as I know.