Several oddities with staff labels horizontal alignment

Dorico
1

Please look at this picture:

Screenshot 2024-01-30 at 19.26.49
Screenshot 2024-01-30 at 19.26.49212Ă—1448 17.2 KB

Two issues:

  1. the 1-2 digits of the condensed piccolos and clarinets are oddly aligned. Changing the paragraph style (this should be centred) to anything else moves the entire column of digits to unwanted places.
  2. the I and II of the Violin sections is not aligned. Notice that Violin II starts with a divisi and I have chosen to hide the divisi section.

Is there anything I can do to improve the situation?

Screenshot 2024-01-30 at 19.27.01
Screenshot 2024-01-30 at 19.27.01496Ă—1398 20.2 KB

2

You may need to upload a project @MicheleGalvagno.

3

For 1. – I believe this can’t be helped, because they are right-aligned and in that font the numerals are not the same width.

4

I will upload a stub tomorrow, thank you for your patience.
@Mark_Johnson : if I center-align them, they end up under (or above) the instrument names. There should be an option to align the text “to itself”. Of course we don’t see how this works under the hood, it may very well be all a single text object cleverly cooked together.
I hope there is a solution.

5

Here’s the project with just the first page.
Instrument Numbers test.dorico (853.4 KB)
I’ve reset everything to Factory to check for possible issues with the font I am using and, indeed, with Academico the numbers are well aligned. I’m not sure I have enough still to live to enter in a discussion with Adobe CC to update this font… :man_facepalming:

The second issue remains, though, with the Violin II Roman numeral being too near to the instrument name compared to Violin I’s numeral. Since Violin II starts with a Divisi section, and I chose to hide divisi labels in Layout Options, I believe the issue is that, while Dorico is not showing the labels, it is still allocating horizontal space for them, therefore causing this issue.
I wonder if there is a “legal” workaround for this or if all my luck is to restore right-aligned staff labels, since that’s the only way I’ve found so far to have it look good (even if I don’t like R-aligned labels, my house style uses them centred).

6

For reference, the first issue was brought up a couple of times last year as well. There was also a thread with a similar issue, even without condensing.

Equal width or “tabular” figures were universal in computer type for many years, but now an increasing number of good fonts have these proportional figures by default (including these forum fonts, Bitter and Work Sans: 0123 – note the 1 is much narrower). Such fonts usually have an OpenType option for tabular figures, which unfortunately Dorico cannot access because of the Qt platform it is built on.

I agree that more alignment options are needed. I use centered staff labels too.

I can fix the second issue by changing the full names in setup to “Violin I” and “Violin II”. This overrides the automatic numbering, since they no longer match.

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