I’m new to Dorico and so far I’m comparing it to other scorewriters. When I printed my score, I’ve noticed that some beams don’t seem to be completely flat and later I realised that the cause are stems, that extend just a bit too much, slightly crossing the beam.
This is an example from my own score, but to prove that it’s not caused by some tweak of a wrong engraving option on my side, I also checked the example projects with their default engraving settings and saw the same there (can’t put a second screenshot because I’m new in the forum).
Yes - they might seem absurdly tiny, but they are much easier to notice on a printed score and since I spotted these once, I can’t stop myself from finding them everywhere. As far as I’ve found out, the issue can only be seen in flat beams, but it’s still very inconsistent. My guess is that the cause is bad interpolation or a rounding error and other scorewriters usually avoid this by cutting the stems somewhere in the middle of the beam, so that they don’t reach the top and start peeking out. So far, I wasn’t able to find any setting that would resolve this. It’s interesting how I could find zero information on this in the forums, even though this can even be seen in a sample work by a professional Dorico engraver.
I don’t think he’s referring to the placement of the beams, but to the stems ‘sticking out’ by 1 pixel, or to some “aliasing” of a pixel. Add to that the rounding-off errors in PostScript, and the problem might be more visible depending on the output device. Amadeus had problems with this in the 80s, but I got a correction code from Adobe in Amsterdam for a 2450 dpi typesetter that fixed it. It even resulted in uneven staff lines.
Perhaps it might depend on things like Screen resolution and scaling, Windows or Mac, etc…
Similarly, the printer’s resolution and rastering capabilities might be at play.
Could very well be this. I like Steinberg’s approach of “exactness”, but perhaps for some devices there could be a case for “Shorten stem by _____ pt at beam side” in the settings, in a future version.
Here I made a short project that shows the issue. Additionally, you can see this basically in every measure of page 1 in the built-in Liebesträume (upper staff).
Also note that, as I said, this thing is extremely inconsistent - some (flat!) beams will remain fine and others will look like that. You could also try different zooming ratios, because at 1600% the scaling factor is an integer (probably) and interpolation doesn’t affect the beam.
At 1600% I don’t see anything wrong on my screen. But if I take a screenshot of a detail and zoom into the screenshot, I can kind of see what you mean:
I can see minute “shading” at ‘odd’ levels like 727%, but in Acrobat Reader at 6400%, there are no signs, so I imported it into Illustrator and made it 64000%, and here something interesting appears;
The left is the stem, the right is the beam (that I have moved horizontally). It appears that the beam extends beyond the stem (or vice versa). If this is a result of rounding in various transformations or of Dorico’s design, only the team can answer.
Let’s forget about the screen in Dorico and ‘odd’ magnifications. I’m sure it is a problem with the screen. How does it look in your PDF or print, with normal eyes, not falcon eyes? Have you tried special paper for your printer? Normal copy paper is usually less suited. I think there once were “chalked papers” for optimum print, but perhaps a thing of the past.
Well, when the sheet is at some distance from the eyes, it’s hard to notice, but definitely possible. Obviously, because I know it’s there (after I spotted it once, probably while marking something) it’s easier to find and that really disturbs me.
The issue can be seen in PDF too, but, similarly to Dorico, at certain zooming ratios only. Printed on paper (normal copy) it’s definitely easier to see, even at a small distance, but I don’t think changing the paper type would fix it.
Just curious - and not that you want to use a different music font - but if you change the font does this still happen? It may be a problem with the font.
— Jim
Yes, the font I generally use is actually Leland, but I’ve tried this with other fonts too and the built-in examples that I also checked use Bravura. It would be strange if it was some issue with the font, because, as far as I know, beams and stems are rendered using lines and not music symbols.
