Staff label alignment

Dorico
1

I’d like to achieve this staff label alignment:
preferred alignment
In Dorico I get either this, which centres the SA and TB labels between the other staff labels:
dorico centred
or this, which doesn’t centre the SA properly (vertically):
dorico right-aligned
Am I missing something?

2

I don’t have a chance to try it out, but it might work…

You could put blanks to the left side of the letter in instrument name/abbreviation.

3

Thank you, that does work but it’s a bit of a workaround. It would also be nice to be able to get the SA and TB staff labels to be centred horizontally without the workaround of having to apply a baseline shift to the names.

4

I would suggest you set the horizontal alignment of the Staff labels paragraph style to the majority case, and then you can override the horizontal alignment of a specific instrument name in the Edit Instrument Names dialog (the ability to respect these alignment overrides in simple cases is a new feature in Dorico 5).

Changing the horizontal alignment, either via the Edit Instrument Names dialog or in the paragraph style, doesn’t do anything to the vertical adjustment. (Indeed, the vertical alignment of the “S A” staff label is identical in both your screenshots.)