Sorry to have to bring this up again but the following example doesn’t look right to me.
Why does Dorico lengthen the stems in the second beat? I can’t seem to find settings which avoid this rather unnatural-looking result. Even restoring to factory defaults doesn’t help.
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I have this with my settings:
My stem lengths are quite short.
Other settings may also come into play…
Not sure about global settings, but switching beam direction to flat in the properties panel should fix it at least locally.
Yes, but you want some angle on it, so that’s not ideal.
Thanks for the effort Ben but, as usual, it’s a lot more complicated. Your settings had no effect on the second beat:
I had to resort to a setting of 2.5 for the 16th note stem length but this resulted in the stems in beat 2 being lengthened(!?), resulting in the following unacceptable result:
And elsewhere, all this futzing resulted in the following unacceptable result:
Aargh!
Are the ‘Stem Shortening’ options in ‘Engraving options’ not what you need?
I might be wrong about this, but I think it’s due to the fact that Dorico will snap beams to allowable positions within the staff, but doesn’t do that outside of the staff. I’ve previously requested a setting to treat beams outside of the staff the same way, even though there is no worry about wedges outside of the staff, for this exact reason as the discrepancy is noticeable IMO. Here’s what I mean …
Using your example with my settings, the first C-B looks poor in comparison to the two Bs as the stem is too long. An outside beam can never end in a space in the staff (descending should only end in straddle or hang), but when I add the ledger lines, it’s clear this particular beam ends in a space. This makes it look really strange and inconsistent IMO, even though there isn’t an adjustment needed to avoid wedge issues.
When I move the group up a space, I get the perfectly allowable sit-straddle for E-D. If I manually edit the C-B to be sit-straddle it looks pretty good to me. It would be nice if there was an option to treat these beams that fall outside the staff the same way.
I think the option is in ‘Engraving Options’ → ‘Notes’ → ‘Stem shortening’, or am I reading this wrong?
Yes and no. A couple years ago when I was geeking out on stems and beams I did a post on what this actually does over on Notat.io. The factory settings look pretty strange to me as they begin to shorten too soon IMO.
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