Dorico naturally misaligns many vertical notes when there are many voices on one stave (Something forced upon everybody setting classical guitar music with accurate durations).
The best fix I know of today is to:
- Switch into engrave mode
- Run a script which sets the relevant voice column index to zero
- Switch into write mode
I have StreamDeck macro for this; but it’s slow because the switching between the modes is slow. And, of course , where notes are tied only a manual switch to engrave mode lets you align the second part of the note (in write mode the selection always starts with the first of the tied notes).
Can voice column index not be available in write mode? I’m just so grateful (I really am! 
) that the effect of voice column index is shown in write mode. In this example misalignment is trivial but for complex examples misalignment makes the music impossible to play.
Is there a better approach than the one I am using?
Voice column index doesn’t belong in Write mode both because it’s a purely graphical property, and such properties belong in Engrave mode, and because it’s set with a context that only makes sense in Engrave mode, which has a richer selection model than Write mode.
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Well, as you are the software architect you can definitively define it like that.
However, I am aware it is Saturday afternoon and all Dorcio team, including yourself, are allowed to have rests. 
I’ll send a helpful suggestion on Monday.
Just to warn you: I won’t be any more receptive to appeals to move this property to Write mode on Monday than I am today!
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Perhaps the best solution is to use 2 windows on separate monitors, one set to write mode and the other to engrave.
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(Happy Monday 
: I won’t challenge your data model today.)
Here is a different question?
Could Dorico’s inbuilt vertical alignment of vertical stacked notes be improved where there is sufficient space to align them vertically?
(In generally if there are no intervals of as second in any resulting chord.)
Right hand example uses voice column index =0 .
Complex ‘hard to read’ misalignments almost always start with this:
And yes: If guitarists didn’t insist on cramming four or five voices
onto one staff, especially as those
five voices must share the
two available directions of ‘up’ and ‘down,’ we wouldn’t have this problem.
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While I do understand you point, please let me say that your example in the first picture is not an improvement but makes matters worse instead.
Yes, the first bar does not look pretty at all. But the second bar totally obfuscates that there are multiple voices involved. If you print the second bar (and all voice colors print black), all you see is two voices - and you can easily miss the tiny gap between the stem of the lowest note and the stem of the 3 notes above.
I do agree that the second bar is more pretty on the surface, but it loses information. When you have 4 voices, they must be represented and visible.
Maybe your case is one of these edge case where the notation rules for your specific instrument don’t go well with the general rules of having multiple voices?
Sadly, guitarists are seldom worried about theoretical niceties, like how many voices are involved.
If the notes are not vertically arranged they won’t play them together. (At least when they are first reading the music, Later they might decide to look more carefully but in any event they will mostly rely upon the fingerings to get them the durations the composer hoped for).
There is an alternative notation for guitar called tableture. That is even more defective because it only gives the start point of every note, you are left guessing how long the notes really last, and in that system you can’t see the voice leading at all.
Traditionally guitarists don’t use two staves because unlike pianists you can’t make any page turns at all.
If it helps a little you can switch to engrave (on a mac) with command+3, and back to write with command+2. On windows it’s ctrl+3 and ctrl+2, respectively. I don’t know if there’s a quicker way to get the voices in the same voice column to start with….
— Jim
@dspreadbury, it might be reasonable to request an engraving setting to ignore voice column adjustments except in the case of major seconds for guitar writing — if that is the standard convention for guitarists. (A big ask, I know!)
I’m not sure how difficult it would be to generally disable the voice column ordering process in Dorico, and for the most part I think that would be a bad thing to do.
However, I do of course accept that it would under some circumstances be helpful to be able to put all the voices into the first voice column as a starting point. I’ll think on it some more, though I can’t promise any imminent changes.
Thank you! You and the whole team at Dorico are a treasure!
Have a good night!
Having provided a lot of theoretical and possibly obtuse examples (sorry) this is more the kind of thing I encounter:
If I don’t correct it a guitarist sight reading may stumble over that first E and D.
And I can echo jaskarbongs comment; the Dorico team are simply splendid.
That’s the kind of situation I would expect Dorico to manage slightly better on its own, to be honest.
