Hello all,
Why is it that the “con rip” marking places itself closer to the music in the viola staff than in the rest?
No manual intervention, I have only been fiddling with the engraving settings. It would be very handy to solve this globally.
There’s a global minimum distance to stave, and a minimum distance to other objects.
The text on the viola stave is identically positioned for the text on the cello stave, relative to the stave. The text on the violin staves can’t get closer to the stave because there are notes in the way.
I would actually like the text on the viola stave to move up a bit. I am aware of the settings – they are 1 3/4 from staff, 3/4 from protruding items. The letter “p” surely is closer to the notehead than 3/4 spaces, don’t you think? Or does Dorico calculate the distance in some other way that I am not aware of?
Testing a bit. It seems that the a1 is not considered a protruding item. If I move it up to b1, the con rip takes protruding item setting in account. Maybe this is it?
My suspicion is that the fact there’s precisely 1 space difference between the values for “Default distance from staff” and “Minimum distance for protruding items” is confusing Dorico. The A1 notehead takes up 1 space. If you turn the Default distance from staff value down to 1 1/2 spaces, you’ll find that the viola’s text jumps up.
The other thing that muddies the waters is that your text Erases Background. I suspect your value for “Padding around text with erased background” is 0 spaces. Change that and you’ll see different behaviour.
Hm, it did not, and the padding is set to 1/4.
BUT – I did tweak the settings for “Erasure padding” top, in the properties pane (with all text selected) to -5/8. Maybe this was the wrong way to go, as it apparently influences vertical spacing in all. I guess I’ll reset and start over again.
I’ll rephrase: when I put your example into my computer and played with it, I assumed your erased background padding was set to 0. Under these circumstances (and sure, I’m using different fonts at different sizes) changing the Default distance from staff value from 1 3/4 to 1 1/2 pushed the viola’s “con rip.” up.
The thing you may not have considered is that the Erasure padding switch does not propagate the default values; it defaults to 0. If you set the Top value to -5/8 but you don’t put a value into the Bottom value, that has the effect of overriding the global Engraving Option for bottom padding (setting it to 0, regardless of what is stored in Engraving Options).
Yes, you are right. I could reproduce that too after a while.
So the reason to this behaviour seems to be that a notehead on top of the first line is not counted as a protruding item, do you agree? Do you get that on your system too?
The comment about the Erasure padding switch: I see that now, thanks for pointing it out. I will make sure I get the defaults right first and then only fiddle with that as a last resort on a case by case basis.
Yes and no. When the gap between the two values is 1 staff space, the A1 doesn’t seem to caught by the protrusion rules. If the gap between the two values is 3/4 or less, the A1 is classed as a protruding item. If the gap between the two values is more than 1, the A1 is classed as a protruding item. I haven’t tested with every possible set of values, obviously, but that’s what I’ve spotted thus far.
I do not get that result. Just to try it, i set
Distance from staff: 1 7/8
Minimum distance from protruding items: 1 7/8
Erasure padding: 0
1 7/8 is a compromise. I would like the Vl 2 con rip lower by default, but if I lower the value, all the other staves will have the text too close (IMHO the notes on, or sitting on the first line should be regarded as protruding items if they are not…).
As you see, the only item where the protrusion rules come into effect, is for the second con rip in the viola that I just put there to illustrate. No difference on my system no matter what the value difference is. This file was started on a previous version, I will start a new file and see if this persists.
Report from new document. Same result.
My supposition is that the logic looks something like this:
If stuff above staff > DefaultDistanceFromStaff, nudge up Text by MinimumDistanceFromProtrudingItems.
If stuff above staff < DefaultDistanceFromStaff, leave Text where it is.
I have to be somewhere else right now, but hopefully somebody who knows the code will chime in.
Thank for the conversation Leo, appreciated.
See attached two images. Both have text with erase background, erasure padding set to zero.
In the first one (1_14), the con rip is in my taste a bit too close to the noteheads, but in spite of that unaffected by the protrusion settings, that seem to kick in only at an even closer distance.
Second one (1_18) has a slightly smaller default staff distance – the marking is affected and goes up.
Distance from protruding items is set to three spaces just for testing purposes.
With Dorico’s default settings none of this is a problem, but if I want to keep things a bit closer to the staff or protruding items, the internal threshold settings for when what happens seem not to be generous enough.
