In Dorico 5 there was a slight problem with some accidentals being too close to ledger lines, like E-natural below;
This could easily be fixed with a manual correction;
But, when opening such a score in Dorico 6 this manually set distance is not respected but added to the updated spacing routine;
which gives it an ugly appearance.
Naturally, removing the user-set values will make it perfect again;
This makes it risky to open old scores. What was once a detailed edit (to perfection) is now ugly and almost impossible(?) to locate efficiently in a score.
I suggest that a user-set value in Engrave mode is “absolute” and overrides any global setting, and/or, there is some efficient way to locate these edits and see if they have turned into something ugly with a new version, and can be dealt with (like removing the setting above) to once again get a perfect layout.
Since properties are always deltas on calculated values, it’s not practical for us to guarantee that the appearance of an existing project will always be precisely the same in a new version. We go to reasonable efforts to achieve this, but there is a point beyond which it becomes too costly, not only in terms of the impact on the code we have to write today to achieve it, but also maintaining that legacy code for years or decades to come.
It’s also very difficult for us to flag these situations up, since the new version is by definition incapable of producing the old result, so it’s not possible for us to detect the places where things might have changed.
You can of course continue to work on existing projects in the previous version, though naturally that will not be a solution for the indefinite future as operating system updates eventually render earlier versions inoperable.
I see and understand the problem. Yes, there is certainly logic to your arguments. Since Dorico does not make many “flaws”, I will “comment” on any (and few) manual edits I make, and if I ever open them again, I can use the comments list to inspect if any changes have been made due to enhanced settings in future versions.
