Many asked for an example, I’ve asked it many times here. Most of the time I already did the spacing by hand and can’t let you see what I mean.
Now I made some pictures of what I mean. In the first picture you see that the rehearsal signs make that Dorico unevenly spreads the systems. When adjusting the rehearsal signs, picture 2, Dorico doesn’t reconsider the new situation and you’ll have to adjust all the systems by hand. The “power” is there, but should be a knob of some kind. I realyy crave for a "recalculate vertical spacing, almost every day. Am I theonly one? Am I doing something wrong?
Yes, it’s in this case. But indeed, as @asherber says: it’s not the rweason.
The reason I call it a bug, is that I can’t imagine being the only one that finds it annoying that my customer asking “hey Roel, write me an arrangement quickly!” makes me: - have inspiration (10 seconds) - make an arrangement (10 minutes) and - manually change vertical position (10 hou… no that’s not true, it won’t take me 10 hours, but significantly more that 10 minutes and I don’t think the Dorico team will see that as how they want thinks, so I will not call it expected behaviour.
This is one example, but a simple “recalculate” knob would solve an incredible amouny of related issues I deal with every day. It would really give me hours in a week in whic I can be creative (or do the dishes).
I really can’t imagine that I’m the only one craving for a “recalculate” button. Or (I’l ask again) am I doing something completely wrong? Am I missing some super handy feature, setting or preference here?
A software bug is something which does not work as designed. In this case, as the dev team has explained elsewhere, it’s working exactly as designed – even if you (and other users) might prefer a different design.
You are not doing anything wrong, and you’re not the only one who has wished that Dorico would reclaim space that’s freed up by manually resolving a collision.
In your particular case above, you might be able to avoid this issue by setting your rehearsal marks to appear at the left of the system, rather than to the right of the clef and key signature (in Engraving Options > Rehearsal Marks > Horizontal Position). [Edit: As @charles_piano has pointed out.] I think that would naturally avoid the collision between the rehearsal marks and the text next to them. (Although it may not be the look you want, for other reasons.)
Yes, I think this will solve this particular issue, I’ll try this, many thanks.
I do still wonder what is the con of being able to recalculate by pressing a button. 1) the calculating is a feature, so the Dorico team is not anti-calculating in general. 2) if you don’t press the button, nothing changes, so anti-recalculating people just avoid the button. I can’t think of another con of a general recalculate button. A workaround for now is undo till the strange vertical spreading happens, and then change something else. Dorico will recalculate! To me, it’s really as if they just forgot to put a recalculate button there, and that’s what I call a bug. If nobody benefits from the absence of this handy button, it should be there. Or am I forgetting something? I’m not a software designer after all.
I can’t find the post where Daniel talked about it, but I think the reason for not including this functionality was basically that recalculation in one place can have unintended effects somewhere else. You move that one rehearsal mark, and things shift…and 3 pages later this causes some other collision. Luckily, you see that and fix it, but it causes a problem on the next page. Or maybe fixing the second collision causes the earlier one to break again.
No, we shouldn’t want a function that messes up things out of sight. Just imagine unintentionally pressing the “i” key activates some devilish insert mode…
Kidding. I understand. But I certainly do not agree, and hope they’ll change their minds. Lose insert mode, gain recalculate button!! I might start a campaign!
Exactly, like changing your Engraving Options in the background without you knowing.
It is better the way it is designed, you defining and adapting the settings by yourself and let Dorico figure out the layout.
But is this any different than finding a problem in engraving mode and fixing it by changing a layout or engraving option? That change will affect the entire score, right? Changing things down the line you thought you had fixed.
A better option would be a single keystroke recalculate button with the option to affect only that page, or all subsequent pages.
IMO it’s different, because when you change an option, it’s a given that it acts on the whole project/flow/layout, and you need to at least eyeball everything.
(I may also be misstating the dev team’s rationale.)
But that’s the point. If recalculating spacing changes things down the line and that’s bad, it’s functionally no different than changing an option that affects things down the line. Both still cause you to waste time fixing those things.
Hi @RoelVanWijk, sorry a little OT (but just to demonstrate that with the appropriate settings you don’t need to “move things manually and recalculate”).
Following the interesting discussion, and as an exercise for myself I made 2 possible layouts with your example (@RoelVanWijk please tell me if you want that I remove the file).
In the second Layout the Avoid Collisions layout option is deactivated (as suggested sometimes for part layouts). There are advantages and disadvantages in both solutions.
(as always you can use the Library manager to compare the settings with your project).
