Subtleties in Figured Bass Resolution

Hello, @Richard_Lanyon,
I was flabbergasted by you suspension chain project, that you posted in 2020 in the Future of Figured Bass topic.
I am trying to achieve this:
resolution
so I tried to enter
4->7,3
(with appropiates d and/or r values), but it never worked. That was instantly to clobbered (even with a “!” prefix) to:
7, 4->3
still in simplified form.
The I tried
8->7, 4->3
and that worked.
But I would have peferred my forst form (which of course is easy yo fake). And first it does not seem natural that
badresolution
be possible and not
resolution
and second, if 4->7,3 is currently not possible, arbitrarily switching the place of the resolution arrow instead of reporting an error seems inappropriate.
But given the wonders that you worked in the 2020 example, would you happen to know a way to make it work without faking it with Engraving?

The problem is to do with how the rows are aligned. Dorico is only able to draw a line between numbers in different figured bass events if it knows that the numbers in the two sets of figures are aligned. Either the two events have to have the same number of rows of numbers, or you can only connect the row that Dorico uses for vertical alignment. By default Dorico aligns the top row of figures for figured bass that is below the staff, and for this case you need to align the bottom row. You can change this in Engraving options, and then it works.

fb example.dorico (1.3 MB)

Just to add, the reason that this case works:

Is that there there’s only one figured bass event rather than two, so alignment isn’t an issue.

Is that the Vertical position of single hold line option, Bottom vs Middle?

No, it’s “Vertical alignment of figures across system when below staff”.

Oops! I found the other one thanks of the Library Manager (a Wondrous Machine by the way :slight_smile: )) in the Engraved Options/Figured Bass section. Where would be this one?
For the moment I am up to
betterresolution

I found it and it seems to work. But the Library Manager did no report it as different :slight_smile: !
Well this is good, much better without the intrusion of 8, not very appropriate I fear. Also it would have beem easy to fix in a sloppy way, but it’s better not to.
Well thanks again :slight_smile: !

Hmm, curious, for me the Library Manager does report the difference when comparing to Factory Settings:

There have been occasional bugs where the Library Manager doesn’t show some options, but for me in v5.1.60 this seems correct.

Oh, I was not comparing with Factory Settings, but between my project and your project :slight_smile: ! And like I said, I find the Library Manager an awesome tool, but it takes some getting used to it. There are so many things, you can easily get confused.