Hello, I apologize if this has been asked (I couldn’t find anything in the forum, manual, or settings), but is there any way to control the amount that Dorico will “kern” an accidental over an adjacent notehead? For example, I’d be happier if Dorico found space elsewhere in the system than have the extreme kerning you can see in the right hand staves of both pianos in m. 107 of the below example. To my eye, m. 100 does not look good this way, and rather than manually adjusting the note spacing or the layout, I’m hoping I just missed a setting where I can tell Dorico not to do this?
Thanks,
Jeff
There isn’t a dedicated option for this, but you might experiment with increasing ‘Gap to left of leftmost accidental’ on the Accidentals page of Engraving Options.
Daniel, thanks so much for the reply, as always. Unfortunately that setting doesn’t seem to affect the kerning behavior I’m referencing. In fact, it makes it look even worse (screenshot attached) because the kerning doesn’t change but other notes on the same line get additional space. I can see why it’s happening (Dorico sees no object to the left of the kerned accidental, so no reason to add “extra” space) but it’s a shame because clearly Dorico can find space to “steal” on the line.
In the third-party program I use to horizontally space music in SCORE (Tom Brodhead’s LJ.EXE), this is a setting you can flip to prevent kerning over notes or rests in different ways. You can turn kerning off above notes while allowing it over accidentals, augmentation dots, flags, etc. You can turn it off above all aspects of a note (including parentheses or ledger lines). You can also block it over all aspects of a rest. These don’t affect subdivisions like tuplets, so the subdivision stays smooth, and it only applies to the left item of two adjacent items. (You can also block specific, individual rests or notes by flagging them.)
It would be really nice to have some way to adjust this sort of thing in Dorico, maybe as some sort of an “allow accidentals to nestle above adjacent chords by this percentage” adjustable setting in the Engraving Options, and as a setting in Engrave mode to block individual objects from having things kerned above them. Now the only options are to put less music on the system or to manually move the notes over (which is awkward when I have many, many measures to deal with.)
Thanks so much for your time.
