Staff label positioning

Dorico
#1

Hi Dorico team,

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.
Staff labels baseline problem.png
I’m hoping for two fixes (and preferably both) to be available:

  1. Is there a way to manually nudge or offset the labels aside from the setting for horizontal-distance-from-music?

  2. 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.

#2

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?

#3

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.

#4

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.

#5

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.

#6

We will take a look at the vertical position problem and try to sort this out.

#7

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.

#8

We have fixed this problem, and the fix will be in the next update.