I’ve encountered this unsightly engraving issue with other programs as well: the angle of the slur when it appears as in the attached sample. At least it’s almost flat here, where in other programs, it actually goes up a LOT. It should be angled down a bit in this instance.
I’m SO happy with how little I need to adjust things in Dorico but I’m often adjusting this instance.
Dear portlandman,
There is an example in p.111 of Elaine Gould’s Behind bars. It goes from a to c and… the slur is flat, as in your example !
What is strange is that when I try and note your example, I get a climbing slur, which, according to Gould, is wrong.
I will follow this thread ^^
Marc,
Here is what I get, which looks different than yours. I had to change defaults in Engraving Options “Vertical Offset from end of stem” to get the “undesired” climbing look.
Interesting. Am I crazy? Shouldn’t the slur go down a bit like the attached screen shot?
Try Vertical Offset of 1 3/8 or 1 1/2 spaces. Attachment shows 1 1/2 spaces.
Yes, I agree that the slur should point downwards. We have a task on our backlog to improve slur positioning in these kinds of mixed-stem direction contexts, and I expect we will tackle this at some point in the future.
Awsome, Daniel 
Sounds great, Daniel.
Of course the most important outcome from this exchange was to absolve me of being crazy. I’m glad that I’m not alone in my slur-angle obsessiveness.
Add me to the obsessed ones, too… in Sibelius in these cases I tended to input the Slur with S, then (while the far right end if the slur was still selected) hit CMD+Down Arrow Key once, followed by fine tuning with another two clicks onto the Down Arrow Key (without CMD). Still I was never really pleased with the result…
Still hoping this might get fixed in the next update. The attachments show 1) what happens automatically upon entry (snippet), and 2) an approximation of what I hope for (snippet2).
In your adjustment, the pitch goes up while the slurs goes down. I always learned that they should go in the same direction, feels more natural to me.
In those examples, I’d be tempted to flip the stem of the middle line note, so that both stems match, which makes the slur a lot nicer.
Andre, I think you have confused the original and the adjusted version.
There’s a vertical endpoint offset from noteheads and a horizontal endpoint offset from stems. It’d be great if there were a vertical offset from stems which could also take intervening notes into account. I’m actually not aware of any software which can do this well automatically.