Hello,
the engrave setting “Shorten ledger lines on notes in runs of short notes” appears to apply only for 32nds and shorter note values? And not take into account the actual tightness of spacing at all?
As you can see in the test screenshot, ledger lines of 32nd notes are always shortened, regardless of the space between the notes… ledger lines of 16th notes are never shortened…
This is quite unhelpful and not how this is supposed to be done in quality engraving (where 16th notes, 8th notes or even quarter notes could be spaced tight enough for ledger line shortening to be required).
Is this something I’m not doing right, or is it an area for planned future improvement?
Thanks and best regards!
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While I agree that Dorico could do more to adjust the length of ledger lines automatically, in the meantime the Ledger line property in engrave mode allows you to make whatever adjustments are appropriate for the current situation. In the first bar of your example, I selected all of the notes and activated the Ledger line property, setting both L and R to 2/5. In the fourth bar, I did the same thing except for setting L and R to 1/5. Now the first two bars look the same as the last two bars except for the number of beams:
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I think that engraving tasks fall into two categories:
1. those that should be left to a human.
2. those that should be accomplished by software.
Automatic ledger line shortening falls into category 2.
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Thank you John and John for your support! Your manually adjusted example looks like one could hope it to be achieved automatically one day.
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To aid this current workflow, would it be possible for the developers to fill in the current value when activating the ledger line property, instead of starting at zero? (As they did with the “space size” property on line breaks.) That would make these kinds of edits much quicker.
