Congratulations on Dorico. I’ve just installed it this weekend and am finding my way happily around.
I discovered a problem with the alignment of staff labels, shown in the attached screenshot. After changing the staff labels paragraph style to use a different font (in this case, Arno Pro), the labels’ vertical alignment suffered. Note that the use of the flat character in the Clarinet label has its own effect as well.
I’m hoping for two fixes (and preferably both) to be available:
Is there a way to manually nudge or offset the labels aside from the setting for horizontal-distance-from-music?
Is there any flexibility as to how Dorico automatically handles staff label positioning? I’m envisioning a system wherein not only would each label be vertically centered, but options would be available for centering by text baseline or by “shrink-wrapped” frame. In this latter example, names with typographic descenders, such as “Trumpet,” would vertically center slightly differently than names without descenders, such as “Oboe,” if that looked better with a certain typeface or to the engraver’s eye.
Yes I’ve seen that too. Usually I could persuade Dorico to fix it by temporarily changing the staff size. I think it’s remedied after a restart, too.
Perhaps it’s a little bug that for some reason the necessary layout recalculation is not triggered here?
Unfortunately it’s non-trivial to allow staff labels to be nudged at the moment, but it’s certainly something we will be thinking about when we come to enrich the program’s staff labelling capabilities in the future.
Hi Daniel, I understand nudging is (and should be) near the bottom of the priority list! It’d be great to see the bug fixed, though. I tried fkretlow’s suggestion, resizing the staves (I followed your suggestions from this thread to do it via the Layout options in Setup Mode), but it didn’t fix the text alignment problem. It seems to happen just by switching fonts away from Academico!
Oddly enough, if one just changes the font size, nothing changes visually — even after restarting the program.
I see that now, too. Sorry for leading you the wrong way. Changing the staff size fixes problems with the horizontal position of staff labels, because in the process Dorico allocates the appropriate amount of space again. I assumed that Dorico would rethink the vertical position of staff labels at the same time. My bad.
No worries, and please don’t apologize — I thought it was worthwhile suggestion to try! Hopefully they’ll be able to work in a patch soon. I’m sure I’m not the only one looking to implement a house style and all the typefaces that entails.
I am having the same issue. For some reason the abbreviated staff labels are centered but the full staff labels are not. The font is New Times Roman Bold.
Thanks, @Derrek. The issue in the OP was vertical alignment, not horizontal. “Piano I” and “Piano II” are not centered on the middle of the piano brace. But I and II are.
The Edit Names dialog box has a Baseline Shift adjustment. I’m not sure why they aren’t even with the abbreviated names, but you could modify the full name to center it on the point of the brace.
Thanks so much, @FredGUnn. Somehow I missed that option in Edit Names. I can’t imagine why the same font would display differently when abbreviated. The baseline was set to 0 in both cases. Now the Full name is set to -1 pt.
The answer is that Dorico aligns the text differently according to its content. I can’t off the top of my head remember the details now, but the intent is to ensure that the text looks optically centred on the staff dependent on its content, and Dorico uses two different sets of metrics derived from the font to achieve that. It appears that this adjustment does more harm than good with this particular font.
It’s maybe not as obvious as John’s example with TNR, but it doesn’t seem to do that well with Academico either. I’m using Academico 14pt here to make it a little more obvious, but the full and abbreviated names have different vertical positioning alignments using it too.
It looks like it’s centring them on the lowercase body height, rather than the full caps height.
(You sometimes see book spines with mostly small caps or lowercase letter, which gives the optical effect of the text being too low down, because it’s centred on the caps height. But I digress…)
I do believe you are right @benwiggy. So it centers on the caps only if there are no lowercase letters. I think a better rule would be to center on the last character in the label .
