When there are three voices in a single staff, the horizontal gap between upper two adjacent (or unison) voices widens when the other lowest voice becomes a dotted note. Please see my Gif.
I feel this behavior weird. Are there any reason for this?
I’m running Dorico Pro 3.5.12, Mac.
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If I had to guess, this will fall under the “needs refinement” category rather than “bug”, but I definitely agree it shouldn’t do that.
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There are some Notation Options for Voices that deal with dotted and undotted notes together.
@benwiggy I just looked through all the relevant options in notation options and engraving options and there doesn’t seem to be a setting that applies to this situation.
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I would hazard a guess it’s to do with them sharing a voice column, and adding the rhythm dot widens that voice column. You could try playing around with which column each note is in?
Thanks for your thoughts. I agree with you. The gap between upper voices should be the same regardless of whether the lowest note is dotted or not, I think.
In my Gif, Up-stem Voice 1 and Down-stem Voice 1 (the lowest note) are in the same Voice column index 1. And Up-stem Voice 2 is in Voice column index 2.
I tried other combination of voice column index, but couldn’t find any solution for this problem. Namely, the gap between upper voices changes depending on whether the lowest note is dotted or not.
I want this gap to be the same regardless of whether the lowest note is dotted or not dotted.
Rather belatedly I have now input your example and I get a different result (without any single-note note spacing offsets) - have you tried recreating this phrase in a fresh project? I got your result when the G at the top was dotted of course.
This problem only occurs when 1st Up-stem voice and 1st Down-stem voice are in the same voice column, and when 2nd Up-stem note is higher than F5.
If this note is lower than E5, this problem doesn’t occur, namely, the gap between upper voices will be the same regardless of whether the lowest note is dotted or not dotted.
In your picture, 2nd Up-stem note exists in D5, but if you move this note to higher than F5, doesn’t this problem occur?
I agree that this is something that would ideally be improved in a future version. The issue is indeed that Dorico is assuming that the up-stem note in the first voice column will also have a rhythm dot and so the note in the second voice column is offset by the width of the rhythm dot. I’ve made a note of this and I’ll look into it when I get a chance (probably not soon, though).
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Ah yes of course I forgot which notes you were highlighting. Interestingly for me, with default settings in this project (or at least I’m fairly sure I’ve reset everything) the up-stem voice 2 note “pushes” the voice 1 G to the left when they’re both Gs, i.e. up-stem voice 2 and down-stem voice 1 share a voice column, and anything higher than G for up-stem voice 2 appears on the left.
Thanks for a reply and explanation, Daniel.
I’m glad to hear that you made a note of this issue. I’m looking forward to a future Dorico version.
By the way, it’s a bit relevant to the topic so far, so let me make another request. It seems that there is currently no Engraving option (or Notation option) to set only the value of the gap between the rhythm dot and the following notehead.
I hope future Dorico will allow this value to be set and modified in the Engraving option too.
With the default settings, it behaves like those. It’s interesting. Maybe it’s because each voice hasn’t been set to specific voice column index.