The text style “Cue Labels” does not respect the number entered under Engraving Options > Text > Vertical Position.
Create new empty project, add a player
Add text (Shift + X), set to “Cue Labels”
Open Engraving Options, go to Text, change the number of “Minimum distance from protruding items” to something else
The text stays where it is and won’t move.
I would expect the Engraving Option to be applied to any manually created text, no matter what the content or the chosen paragraph style of the text may be. It’s a “minimum distance” after all, so it should be a hard limit to how close text can go to anything else. (Given that there is enough room on the page, of course.)
Is there a distance set in the paragraph style itself? I always assumed that that takes precedence over the Engraving option, but I never properly tested that.
The “Cue Labels” paragraph style has no “Distance from staff” setting by itself, it inherits the base value from “Default Text”.
But if I change the used paragraph style of the text from “Cue Labels” to “Default Text”, the distance setting from Engraving Options is being respected. So i guess there must be some logic implemented that disregards the minimum distance setting for all Cue Labels. I guess this is fine if we are talking about “real” cues, where there might be additional logic behind the hood for placing the label above or below notes. But if used within a manually created text item, I need the minimum distance to work. I’m working on a piece where spacing is quite tight, so I need the Default Text to have a distance from staff of only 1, which in turn leads to manually created Cue Labels being way too close to notes.
If it’s a new empty project, there aren’t any protruding items. The only distance being used is the “distance from staff” from the paragraph style itself (in Dorico 6).
Please have a quick look at this file where I cut away almost all of the original content: MinimumDistance.dorico (1.4 MB)
When you open the layout “Trompete (Bb) 1” you see the text “Flügelhorn 1” right at the first bar. It is positioned 1.5 spaces above the staff as this is the value configured in the “Default Text” paragraph style. Totally expected, looks great.
Then have a look at the layout “Posaune 1”. There you find the text “Tenorhorn”. This text has been moved up a bit by Dorico - so as I understand it, Dorico has found that the note above the staff is such a “protruding item” and thus the text needs to be shifted up. But in Engraving options, the value for minimum distance from such protruding items is currently set to 6 (!) spaces (just for this demonstration, of course).
There is less space between the text and the note in this layout than between the text and the staff in the other layout. That’s what caught my eye and what sent me down this rabbit hole.
It looks a note right above the staff is not considered to be a protruding item. Change the Bb in the Posaune layout to a C, and the text jumps up 6 spaces.
Oh, that’s interesting, you are right!
There seems to be some grey area where Dorico already moves the text but does not yet consider the minimum distance option.
