I think this has been asked before, so adding my voice…
I would like the ability in Engraving Options to adjust the position of all Altered Bass Note chords. Currently, they always appear too “spread out”, and I have to adjust each separate chord individually in Default Chord Symbol Appearances. This can be quite time-consuming for projects with a lot of Altered Bass Note Chords.
When using Project Default Chord Symbol Appearance, hitting Apply does not immediately show the change I have made in the score. I must Close the window to see the result. So if I need to make a further adjustment, I have to re-open the window AND re-select the chord I was just working on. If I need to make multiple fine adjustments, this results in many many many mouse clicks, closing the window, opening it again, re-selecting the chord again, etc. In most other similar windows in Dorico, hitting Apply will show your change in the score, then you can Close the window if you’re satisfied. I would like the same behaviour for the Chord Symbol Appearance window, please.
Here we go, @Derrek . The first bar contains the default action when inputting chords with altered bass notes. (The same with every version of Dorico since 2. I’m now on 5.)
The second bar is what I need to do with every different altered-bass-note chord, in order to tighten up the placement and make it easier to read. I’ve moved both the slash and the bass note to the left, and this is how I would like all altered bass note chords to appear.
I do not usually use this altered bass format, preferring to keep the chord symbol aligned vertically, but I find when I test out the format you are using, the elements of the chord symbols are not so widely spaced. (I agree that your first measure symbols look very loosely spaced.)
I wonder if the font you use for these symbols may be at the root of this. I use Academico (not that I’m suggesting you do so), and it seems to produce more tightly spaced symbols.
What point size are you using for your chord symbol font style? I think the factory default is 11pt. I have found that at the default size, the slash chords are usually nicely spaced, but when I bump that up to 14 or 15, I get similar, too-widely-spaced slash chords, like your first bar. So instead of changing the point size, I keep it at 11, and then use the custom scale property to enlarge the chord symbols, which preserves the ideal spacing.
As you’ve noticed, Dorico is lacking any settings to adjust these. I created a doricolib file that creates a “Chord Symbols Slash Font” font style, and posted a walkthrough in this thread. If you use that style to reduce the size of the slash a bit, I think you’ll get better default kerning. Using Petaluma, once I reduced it, I get this with no manual editing at all:
The G/A chord is obviously not spaced well, but the others aren’t terrible IMO. The slash is now quite small, but if you can live with it, it may save you a ton of time manually editing these.
I’ve now looked closely at the two workarounds suggested. They go one step towards improving the situation, but neither of them really do the job, imho.
The full solution is to provide more Engraving Options, to provide horizontal and vertical spacing options for altered bass note chord symbols.
I’m using Petaluma font, and using @Stu_M 's suggestion of keeping the default overall font size at 11, and using Custom Scale to increase the size of all chord symbols, is a small improvement, but not enough, especially for densely-packed scores with, for example, 4 chord changes in a bar.
The @FredGUnn “Chord Symbols Slash Font” is an interesting approach, and again, fine for some situations, but it is still an approximate workaround, and of course, the more you tighten the layout, the less visible the slash appears.
When I first started working with Dorico, I was almost shocked at the depth of Engraving Options when it comes to spacing of notes, lyrics, almost everything. But I’ve found an omission that really could do with some improvement, as I do a lot of work with lead sheets.
So this is my vote for an upcoming release: Please add some Engraving Options that will help me, and lots of others who use chord symbols regularly.
Completely agree. There really should be a setting for slash size, slash vertical offset, and left and right gaps on slashes (that will accept negative values too of course).
