Odd Beaming Puzzle

To get better at engraving with Dorico, I decided to do one of the Mendelssohn pieces I’ve been working on. I’ve run into a difficult measure that I’ve been unable to reproduce:


The middle voice in the upper measure has an odd beaming, similar to centered beaming. Here’s the best I could do, but you can see the stem is all wrong on the f-natural:
dorico-zigzag-beam.jpg
Is this possible with Dorico?

I think even Mendelssohn (or his engraver?) found this one a puzzle. Note how everywhere else the first note of the middle voice triplet doubles one of the outer parts, but in this case only he squeezes in a 16th rest at the start of the triplet, because a doubling would lead to a still uglier beaming configuration. Look for ‘Creating centered beams’ in the Dorico 1.2.10 Operation Manual (p. 394). — In contemporary engraving I think we would simply let the middle part’s beam cut through a stem in this case.

Yes, I looked at the Create Centered Beams option, but it wasn’t working how I wanted it to. The two notes are both on the same side of the center line of the staff. It appears a center beam will only be created if the two notes are on opposite sides, of that center line, or on separate staffs.

This came up a couple of weeks ago. There’s a glitch in Dorico that means that the stem will be drawn on the wrong side in certain cases. There’s nothing you can do about it.

The correct solution for this would be to allow you to use Force Centered Beam in this scenario, but Dorico doesn’t currently allow it because the interval is too small. We plan to relax this restriction and allow centred beams between any interval in future, though you wouldn’t get this very compact result by default: you would still need to do some adjustment in Engrave mode.

Excellent, thanks Daniel!