System position time sig default placement and vertical alignment

Dorico
1

Apologies in advance for what is turning into my daily ‘missing something’ questions, but…

  1. Given the default above staff placement setting,
    default settings
    default settings677×573 23.9 KB

    what explains the different actual placement shown by the offset?
    Result
    Result320×642 14.1 KB
  2. back in '19, there was a question about vertical alignment of displaced system position time sigs. Is there any way to make manual alignment more efficient? Even just seeing the actual space value would speed things up enormously.
    As always, thanks loads!
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  1. It looks to me as if Dorico allows about ⅕ space of white between the default 0.13sp staff lines and the bottom of a large time sig numeral, when the gap (the 2nd setting in the 1st screenshot) is set to 0. So your ½sp gap minus ¾sp (the Y offset in the 2nd screenshot) makes it overlap the staff line by 0.05sp … a little less than half the thickness of the staff line, which is about how it looks there.
  2. I’m not quite understanding the situation. Do you have a link to the 2019 thread?
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Hi Mark,
I get that there is a vertical gap between staff and time sig baseline (for graphic clarity’s sake) even if the default gap is ‘0.’ What I was hoping for is the precise way that safety space is defined.
The root of that inquiry comes from what turns out to be a question that has come up more than once, but does not seem to have been addressed. As in this one from '22…
Aligning vertically displaced system position time sigs
As things stand now, the only way I know to achieve that alignment is to…
offset the most displaced sig down to the staff in order to get the exact vertical distance that all the other sigs will need to be offset to (and then undo that temp offset);
repeat that process for any other sig that has been displaced so that each will be offset to a distinct value;
offset all of the undisplaced sigs to the new distance (the only step that can be applied to multiple items at once.)
Understanding how the clarity spacing is defined is necessary as part of the calculations of various offsets that bring all the sigs into alignment.
So, I wish there was a grid overlay or a contextual pop-up that shows the vertical spacing value for each item. Either way would make the process far more efficient. And I am completely open to any other ideas!

1 Like
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Thanks for the link. Now I understand the issue, and why you asked the first question. I looked for an “align in a row” command like in Sibelius but currently that seems to exist only for dynamics (and, logically, it can be used only in Engrave mode).

Such a command for time sigs would solve the issue – but only on a per-system basis. Obviously what you’re looking for is automatic alignment across each system, the way lyrics avoid collisions and stay aligned at the same time.

5

By the way, I’m finding all sorts of issues in trying to select and shift time sigs.
My house style aligns system position time sigs inside the bar, but to get the consistent x relation to the barline, in Dorico that means defaulting the sigs as barline centered and then adding an across the board offset. But…
starting with a top staff sig, and then expanding the selection to the rest of the system will only include the top staff instances, and adjusting the offset will only happen if the property has been activated before expanding the selection.
On the other hand… if the starting selection comes from a mid system staff (like above first violins) then you can expand the selection before activating the property, and that expanded selection will include the top staff instance of the initial choice, as well as the expansion on the mid-staff (but not any of the other top staff instances.)
(I love different feeds into software loops…)