I’m hoping in a future version we might see a way to adjust the space between the “tr” of a trill and its accompanying wavy line. To my eyes, Dorico’s line is way too far from the “tr.” There are a lot of preferences controlling trill lines, but the closest to this appears to be the very last preference in in the Ornaments panel of Engraving Options, and it only affects line if there is an accidental involved. Personally I think by default the wavy line should touch the “r” of “tr” but a preference would certainly make everybody happy.
For reference, here are some examples — from Henle, Barenreiter, and very old Boosey & Hawkes scores — compared to Dorico. (Sorry for the weird large JPG.)
This happens because Dorico tries to make the trill line in a definite place rhythmically, and the trill wiggle, being of a fixed size, means that in order to end in a fixed place, we have to accept a variable gap between the “tr” and the first wiggle. If you personally prefer a smaller gap between “tr” and the wiggle, you can set the engraving option ‘Position of remainder gap for trill extension line’ to ‘At end of trill’, which will help somewhat.
However, at present the gap between the “tr” and the wiggly line will never be smaller than 1/2 space, and perhaps we could instead make this gap amenable to the existing option that specifies the gap between the trill marking, any accidental to its right, and the wiggly line. We’ll take a look at this when we can.
I do think that the exact position of the first segment of the line relative to the tr sign is more important than the exact beat placement of the end of the line. I’m sure you thought of this as an improvement over Sibelius (more like how dot leaders are handled in typesetting), but in this case the old way of handling it was better for reading.
I would strongly agree with Mark. The distance “tr”----wavy line is much more important than the ending and IMO the “r” should touch the wavy line. But, why not accommodate for both sides, stretching/compressing the entire wavy line to have it end where it “should” end. In general that would only be some small fractions of the length, and only noticeable at short wavy lines (long wouldn’t be noticeable at all). Naturally with an option to turn on/off stretching/compression.
I suspect that would look horrible in a situation where there were several short lines (i.e. 3 or 4 waves) on a page, all of slightly different lengths.
Of course you could contemplate respacing the music to perfectly match up with the lengths of the trill lines - but that’s probably going an “extra mile” too far!
I already have that preference set that way, yes. Unfortunately I still think it’s too distant. Thanks for adding this to your lists!)
Actually, I can tell you there is certainly a small amount of wiggle room (:P) below which the eye will not detect a difference. I agree with you, Rob, that this is not the ideal solution but you’d be surprised what looks completely fine. (SCORE has the ability to adjust these sorts of characteristics on an item-by-item basis.)
I’ve never tried this sort of “font tweaking” with music, but LaTeX has a “microtypography” function which can make small changes to the width of text characters to make line justification more even . Once I notice it has being done somewhere in a document, I start to see it everywhere, and find it annoying!
And note, the maximum character stretch in “microtype” is only 2% with the default settings - too small to make much difference to a trill line with only 3 or 4 waves.
For example in the attachment (taken from the microtype documentation) the word “draft” at the end of lines 2 and 4 are slightly different widths, and it shows. Maybe my eyesight is too good for this sort of thing
