Rehearsal mark collisions with chord symbols

It’s a bit disappointing that rehearsal marks and chord symbols still collide routinely at double bars. There are so many good things in Dorico but I’m seeing a lot of scores with an ugly collision at rehearsal mark A. It’s not a great signature for Dorico to have.

Anyway, is there any way of stopping this happening in Dorico Elements and SE please?

No, I don’t think so. You can set distances above the staff in Engraving Options, but that’s Pro.

I’d be interested to see the projects in which you’re experiencing these collisions, since Dorico should automatically resolve them.

The collisions were discussed at Rehearsal Marks Issue - Dorico - Steinberg Forums.

They’re very easy to reproduce (which is the problem) with the default settings. Create a new file from a template, add several bars, add a rehearsal mark at say bar 3 (it will have index 1 and therefore be an A), add a chord symbol in that bar - all is well - then change the preceding barline to a double bar. There will then be a collision. This also happens if the rehearsal mark is a V (index 22) but this is less likely to be on page one and quite so conspicuous.

The reason for this specific collision is that Dorico is not currently taking into account the width of the border around the rehearsal mark correctly, so things can encroach on half of the width of the rehearsal mark’s border. This is surprisingly difficult to avoid for technical reasons, but it’s something we will address in a future version.

Unfortunately for Elements and SE users, there’s nothing you can practically do about the problem at present.

For any Elements and SE users having problems with this, use Unicode U+200A (Hair Space) as a Prefix for the Rehearsal Mark. The A is shifted slightly to the right within the enclosure but not too far.

Most other promising sounding characters – like U+200B (Zero Width Space) – aren’t actually any help. Two U+202F (Narrow No-Break Space) can be used as a Suffix (one does nothing) but will shift the A further to the left than U+200A moves it to the right.

My experiments were with Windows 10 (Version 2004) and I haven’t tried this on a Mac.

For what it’s worth I just came across this thread looking to solve the same problem (except in my project the boxed system text was causing the rehearsal marks to collide and be pushed up). Seeing Daniel’s comment about Dorico not accounting for the width of the border, I went into engraving options and changed the L/R padding space to 0 and it seemed to fix my issue.

I think it would be nice to see Dorico intelligently nudge things like chord symbols and text to the right of rehearsal marks if it falls within a certain threshold (what that threshold is, is well above my abilities).

I also have the horizontal offset set to -1/2 for system barline marks (again just making a bit more room in case I’m working on a percussion part or something in Cmaj/Amin)

I also have my rehearsal marks set to right-aligned just to make more room for stuff for the occasional mid staff rehearsal mark (I am normally adamant about double bars at the end of lines, but sometimes the line just makes that less intuitive).

I’m sure that will cause issues with chord symbols later and I may change it on another project, but since Dorico doesn’t automatically adjust other items when you manually move a collision out of the way in engrave mode (ala Sibelius) this is the best I’ve come up with.