While Dorico’s default spacing is generally very good, there are times when manual tweaking might always be necessary. This is an example recently posted on the Finale forum and, while Finale makes a mess of it, Dorico sets it almost perfectly, but there’s the rub: almost still isn’t good enough. There’s not quite enough space after the augmentation dot in the second bar and I would need to move the second 8th to the right a bit (actually shift all the notes after the dot) but this isn’t possible in Dorico (yet). Or am I missing a setting somewhere?
I think this is a good point to make about default spacing: It looks wrong if there is more space between notes on the same beat than there is before the next note. In this example, with the default distance for seconds being so wide (stems not lining up at all), there must be space added after the rhythm dot.
Yes, the situation shown in your example is not perfectly handled as yet, and hopefully we can improve the default appearance here in due course. We do in any case plan to make it possible to edit the horizontal spacing manually as soon as we can – hopefully in the next update following the forthcoming 1.0.10 update (in which we have focused on editing vertical spacing).
Vaughan, I wonder whether you could consider changing the format of the screenshots you attach here? TIFF files can’t be opened by my browser so I have to switch out to another program to look at them, which is inconvenient. On OS X you can change the format of graphic that you grab via the following Terminal command (I think):
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type png;killall SystemUIServer
That should make your grabs in PNG format, which can be opened by all web browsers. Thanks for considering.
Your Terminal command works perfectly 
Once again, sorry! I was unaware of any problem with TIFFs. I’ve converted the above to PNG.