Dan and pianoleo, thanks for your patience with me about the Layout Options window. Your explanations were clear and I get it now.
I donāt know how I can put this any more clearly:
Iām not voicing an opinion about Doricoās behaviour.
Iām explaining whatās going on with the spacing in your examples - what Doricoās actually doing - in order that you learn how to work around it.
BTW, the problem with those two rest bars at the beginning (āirregular spacingā) had to do with the āa tempoā being on the last 8th of the bar. If I place the āa tempoā at the beginning of the bar, Dorico treats it as āsingle bar multi-bar restā and gives it the same width as the calando bar. As soon as I move the āa tempoā away from the first beat of the bar, Dorico treats it as a non-empty bar (like a fermata bar) and spaces it according to the time signature. Do you see how illogical this is?
Your explanation of how Dorico treats different kinds of empty bars was very clear. The point is that it produces confusing and illogical results, and the question is, how DO I work around it?
While I agree there are improvements that could be made in regards to accommodating these sorts of tempo indications, I donāt agree that this particular behavior is illogical.
To me it makes perfect sense that if such a tempo indication is attached to the beginning of an otherwise empty bar, it would treat it as an empty bar, but if it is attached to a different (explicit) rhythmic position within the bar, itās no longer empty.
Thereās an exception in the spacing rules for tempo on downbeats: if a tempo is positioned on the first beat of the bar, it wonāt break a multirest, whether thatās a one bar multirest or a 64 bar multirest.
If a tempo marking is anywhere apart from the downbeat, a player may need to know specifically where that tempo applies, so it MUST break a multirest, whether a one bar multirest or a 64 bar multirest.
Again, not my opinion, just an explanation of whatās going on.
As far as a solution, I would spend a little more time on some of those additional spacing options in the multi-bar rest Engraving Options I mentioned earlier. There are some minimum and maximum values which might help your automatic output. Beyond that, youāll need to apply manual note spacing.
I can see your point but then I would have (or perhaps should have) put a dotted quarter rest and an eighth rest with the āa tempoā over the latter. In any case, I wish there were a way I could prevent an empty bar from being three times the width of an empty fermata bar.
Reduce the width of a single bar multirest in Engraving Options s > Rests, then tweak with the Note Spacing tool.
This is logical. As I just wrote, I should probably place rests in empty bars which have tempo indications on another beat than the first.
Iāll experiment with a smaller minimum multi bar rest value. Can one change the width of non single bar multi bar rests?
In that same section, you can set a max and a min width.
I know, but is it possible to tweak a bar width?
With the Note Spacing tool, yes. There should be a square handle above each barline.
I see that but I canāt do anything with it. If I double click it, I return to Write mode. If I right click it I get a contextual menu with all kinds of operations which have nothing to do with the bar. If I alt-arrow it, system breaks are placed at the beginning of that system and the next one. What else can I do with it?
Alt-arrow is the solution. Select the box handle, Alt-arrow to make it wider or narrower. Breaksā¦? Not sure about that.
Iām waiting for a Leo GIFā¦
Not gonna happen right now. Iām in front of Netflixā¦
Iād seen that but I hadnāt thought to use it on an empty bar. A single bar multi bar rest is indeed empty but an empty bar with a fermata has two spacing handles which I can use to widen the bar to be more similar to the MB rest. Itāll have to do for now. Thanks!
Iāve just had a conversation about this with my colleague Andrew, who is our spacing guru, and weāre going to see if we can do something about this issue, namely that when you have the option set to not show the bar count on a single-bar multi-bar rest, it should be spaced like a regular empty bar rather than like a multi-bar rest. I canāt promise that we can do anything about this immediately, but weāll definitely be able to do something about it in the medium-term.