In my (getting quite close!) transcription of Holst’s Choral Hymns of the Rig Veda Group 3, I’ve noticed an odd behaviour that I wouldn’t have expected, nor would have expected others to have encountered. I’ve found, after adding the choral lines and lyrics, that adding the harp pedal indicators and subsequently adjusting their horizontal placement also affected lyric alignment on notes sharing the same position.
Is this behaviour to be expected, given I’m moving note-attached entities without having fixed the lyric placement using the offset hack?
(Please ignore other collisions and infelicities!)
What’s happening there is not a bug, but rather a consequence of the way Dorico’s spacing works. When Dorico is resolving collisions between items, it can only resolve those collisions if they are at adjacent global spacing columns. A global spacing column arises from any item (not only a note) at a particular rhythmic position. When you move the harp pedal changes to positions in between notes, it introduces new global columns, and that influences how the spacing between lyrics is resolved. The lyrics still shouldn’t collide, but in particular the “wiggling” that Dorico performs to adjust lyrics from their default left- or centre-aligned positions will be slightly different depending on whether they are at adjacent global column positions.