I know my eyes are tired after staring at the screen all day, but this does look odd, right?
Single staff, no manual adjustments, system is 97.2% full. Do others get similar spacing? Did I do something to screw up my grace note spacing settings, or something else? It doesn’t seem like a phrase that is so complex that I should need to manually tweak it I guess. It looks fine if I delete the grace note.
I get the same with the default settings.
Deleting the cautionary accidental before the grace note makes the specing look better.
Or, reduce Engraving Options / Notes / Minimum distance between rightmost grace note and rhythmic item from 1/2 to about 1/4.
Yes, the same in my project. IMHO grace notes need too much space in Dorico. Global adjustments just help a little since too big changings in engraving options cause quirks at other places.
Thanks for checking Rob, and I did modify that setting after seeing your comment. Pepinello, the addition of the ledger lines, as Daniel pointed out, makes your examples a bit more complicated than mine. I guess I wouldn’t necessarily be surprised if they needed a bit of manual tweaking with ledger lines, but my example seemed pretty straightforward so I wasn’t expecting to need to adjust it manually.
Here’s an example without a grace note, single staff, no manual adjustment, 96.0% full:
I might be wrong, but it looks to me like Dorico applies some kerning between the B and the G# in the second bar to achieve better spacing, but doesn’t apply any in the first bar between the B and the G# grace note. There is definitely more horizontal space between the end of the B and the start of the # in the grace note bar than there is in the bar without the grace note. I wonder if that’s a bug, or just a feature that was never implemented due to complications of handling grace notes. In any case, it does throw off the spacing a bit. It would be great if Dorico could apply the same type of spacing here with grace notes that it does with regular notes.
Dorico does not allow grace notes to tuck or kern with the preceding musical material. I agree that it would be nice if it could do so, but that’s not something the program can do automatically at the moment.
Thanks! Obviously automatically would be great, but an Engraving Options setting for grace note kerning with intervals over a 4th would probably work, as well as a Properties box where the user could manually specify the kerning. Any of those would be easier than trying to adjust the horizontal positioning manually in Engrave.