Vertical position of fingering inside staff

In attached example, I would like B rather than A and can’t get the Engraving option “Vertical offset for fingerings positioned in spaces inside the staff” to function to correct it.
Fingering inside staff.jpeg
As well, the positioning of the finger numbers in the following example from the Engraving options puzzles me. Why are the fingerings for the space notes placed on lines? I wonder if Dorico isn’t operating according to different positioning conventions than I am accustomed to.

One could argue that they’re much more readable like that. And you only have to erase one staff line.
Of course it’s less simple when there are more of them tightly stacked.

Thanks, fkretlow. And one could also argue that the numbers are more readable without a line intersecting them, if you don’t like staff lines being erased by the fingering. Look what happened to the 4 in ex A in my first example. To me the numbers don’t even seem to correspond to the notes they belong with. Look at the 5 in ex. A.

In any case, I prefer the style shown in B, which is what I am used to seeing in piano music. Is any way to achieve this in Dorico without hand adjustment?

I can’t see any logic at all in example A.

My brain has learned to tune out fingering marks as random noise most of the time anyway, but if people have some compulsive urge to cover keyboard scores with numbers, at least option B looks tidy. :imp:

Thanks, Rob. I don’t think I was clear in my original post. Ex. A is the Dorico default. As you said, it has little apparent logic, although I think there is a method to its madness.

On the other topic. I have known excellent musicians who never write in fingering, and excellent musicians who write it all in. And some musicians like to know what other musicians have done in the way of fingering, pedaling etc. because it is educational. Not every number for a chord, of course. That is only an example to show what I encountered in Dorico.

In a lot of classical guitar scores fingerings inside staff can appear in the same piece as well between the lines as also on the lines.
One can find this mixed behaviour in such publishing companies like Universal Edition, Max Eschig, Schott, Ricordi … (just to name some of the well known houses).
But I must say after a close looking it is difficult to find rules for when this or this is used.
It seems to be very dependent of the engraver choice.

Though Dorico 3 offers really a lot of settings for fingerings I also could not find one concerning the basic vertical placement.
I am curious to hear Daniels answer on this.

Edit:
After further looking it seems as if in Ricordi scores “3” and “4” are always between the lines
For the other mentioned publishing houses, the fingerings do not seem to follow any strict rule.

teacue, the rules for placing finger numbers in piano music are complex and to my knowledge have never been spelled out completely, so there is a lot of variation, inconsistency, and frankly, sloppiness. However, I see less variation in the best publishers regarding numbers placed in the staff and directly to the left of note heads. The finger numbers for space notes are in the same space, and those for a note on a line are bisected by that staff line.

I also follow a similar rule for fingering in the staff placed above or below notes. They are either completely in a space, or bisected by a line. To do otherwise looks sloppy to me, and from what I see, to many other engravers. And what is the alternative? To place each one differently? That works against the consistent appearance of fine engraving. To place them all off center by a specified amount? In that case, Dorico should provide the ability to control the amount of offset, so every engraver can decide the issue for themselves.

Groups of finger numbers (seconds in the chords or other situations) sometimes require a relaxing of the above rule and various compromises. Dorico seems to have dealt with some of these.

I’ve been discussing this with my colleague Michael, who has been the lead developer on all of the fingering features in Dorico, and it should be straightforward to expose an additional option to tell Dorico that you prefer fingerings to be centred on spaces if possible. We plan to add this in a future version.

Great to hear and thanks for considering this option.

Thank you, Daniel. The option I was suggesting would center fingering for space notes in spaces, but the fingering for line notes would be bisected by the staff line.

Hi John,

We’re just looking at this now (I’m one of the Dorico testers), but we don’t find we get your case A even with the existing options - for me the fingerings on the line are indeed bisected by the staff line. Could you attach a small example score here so we can check what’s going on?

Richard

Richard, would having replaced the Bravura fingering characters with Maestro have some bearing on the on-staff positioning? It didn’t seem to affect the off-staff positioning. I am a little concerned about posting a file since it contains a proprietary G clef.

Ah, yes, that might indeed explain things: I imagine Dorico is positioning the fingerings assuming that the glyphs have the metrics that they do in Bravura. Did you change the characters using Engrave > Music Symbols, or did you set the Fingerings to use “Plain font” and then edit the “Fingering text font” in Engrave > Font Styles?

I’m pretty sure I changed them using Engrave > Music Symbols. I just checked the Engrave >Font Styles for fingering and it is still set to Bravura. I am now very curious as to what my example would look like in Bravura, but don’t want to change back and forth for fear of mis-positioning a lot of previous fingering in another file. Could you post what you are getting for my example?

It looks like this:
Capture.PNG

Thanks, Richard. So the fingering for the line notes is good and Daniel’s solution to provide a option to place the space-note fingering completely in a space will work for those using the Bravura fingering symbols. But it will not necessarily work for those using other fonts. A way to adjust the vertical position of the finger numbers by means of numerical input might be needed.

Without that capability, I would reposition the glyph in the music symbol editor by trial and error so that the numbers are placed correctly on the staff. But that might or might not throw off the off-staff fingering. I do find it curious that the off-the-staff fingering seems unaffected by the Maestro font.

Dorico only attempts to align the fingerings to the staff lines when they are within the staff, so I think that is why the Maestro font is OK off-staff: aligning the numbers to the staff lines is the bit that depends on the font metrics.

I replaced the fingering (plain) with Maestro numbers and offset them 1.00 in the vertical. Unfortunately it centered ALL the finger numbers on the lines including the space notes, and also affected the finger numbers off the staff a little unpredictably; note the two 4’s in succession in the example:


So this is clearly not a solution for me. Hopefully the option that Daniel mentioned will keep the line note fingering centered on the lines as now but also place the space note fingering completely in the spaces.

Looking at the left hand chord, the fingering numbers are too big to center them all on staff lines (look at the 1 and 2), so I guess Dorico is doing the best it can to avoid the numbers overlapping.

For the 4’s, if you are using the (default) oversized note heads, presumably the E counts as “protruding outside the staff” so it activates a different engraving option from the D which is inside the staff.

Thanks Rob. I made the Maestro fingering numbers the same size as the Bravura, but of course they could be smaller. In any case, Dorico is doing well enough in centering the numbers on the lines for me. But I can’t center them on both lines and spaces.

As far as the note heads, I remember getting into that last demo of Dorico 2, but can’t remember much about it or what I did. I would imagine I am using the default now, so your explanation is probably correct. I hope that it doesn’t do that with the Bravura numbers.