I’m working on parts to an opera and running into some strange behavior with some string divisi. In the following GIF, you can see a 3-part divisi ends at the “unison” signpost. But look at the ties from that system to the following one. Two of the ties draw as short (l.v.) ties, and if I manually add a system break, two of the ties disappear completely.
Is this a strange bug, or am I doing something wrong? Searching on the forum I don’t see other people asking about divisi ties, and it seems like this would happen often.
(I haven’t yet quite figured out how to get the “unis.” to correctly appear at the beginning of the following staff, so ignore the triple-duplicated unison text.) Happy to share the Dorico file with an employee if it’s useful, it’s just a gigantic file so rather unwieldy.
The issue with ties not appearing correctly on a unison chunk at the end of a system is indeed unfortunately a bug, and a rather tricky one as well. It’s on the list to be fixed in future. In the meantime, although it’s somewhat contrary to the way we like to approach these things, unfortunately you’ll need to move the unison so that it coincides with the end of the system and manually duplicate the music onto the divisi staves.
Could I ask if this issue was resolved (I can’t find a later post). I know everyone’s really busy after the new version release so appreciate any help, thanks!
thanks David - I think similar issue (though in my case, ties for unison notes don’t appear in the end bar when the tie goes over a system). I will see if I can workaround with manual staff visibility.
From a quick test I just did, yes, it appears this problem is unchanged in Dorico 4. Ties (and slurs) disappear or display as l.v. ties in these situations. As Daniel suggested in May 2019, it’s possible to move the unison to the end of the staff and manually duplicate music onto divisi staves—but of course, that workaround can make it look good in either the score or the part, but not both at once.
It’s an unfortunate bug, and I had hoped it would be fixed in Dorico 4. This has kept me from engraving any complex orchestra pieces in Dorico without maintaining separate files for the score and parts—very much counter Dorico’s philosophy!
Thanks for checking! I’m nearly at the end of a big project and don’t want to upgrade until that’s out of the way. Yes, moving the unison mark works, but as you point out it’s not great for long or complex pieces, as the parts are a problem even if the main score looks ok. This is the first serious issue I’ve had with Dorico, pretty much everything else has been great!
