When I move notes across piano staves, other instruments notepad positions get weird in an attempt to match piano notes. Is there an easy fix to this? (see image)
Layout options>Note spacing, disable optical spacing. That spacing only works with the kind of beaming you have in your piano staff. To make this work as a whole, it might be necessary to change locally the note spacing (Engrave mode>Engrave menu>Add note spacing change) to give more space to the short notes so that it doesn’t look too messy) and keep the optical note spacing for the piano part only…
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You mentioned, that you moved Piano notes, so maybe @MarcLarcher’s response wont apply. If you move notes horizontally, by default all other notes that happen simultaneously will move, too. This makes sense for obvious reasons.
However, you can only move the notes by following steps:
- Be in engrave mode
- be in horizontal spacing submode
- select the rectangular box on the piano staff
- a circular box appears
- move the note with the circular box only
In this way, all other notes on that rhythmic position will stay at their original place, however simultaneous notes are not vertically aligned anymore.
I personally would only care about optical spacing in the piano part, and leave it in the score as it is.
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To be fair, in situations with cross-beaming I’m afraid Dorico sometimes does make the wrong decision as to which staff gets to decide the overall note column spacing. For Dorico, apparently, the cross-beamed figure is leading because it’s the most ‘special’. Unfortunately, Dorico doesn’t ‘see’ that this messes up the spacing in the top staff with the normal beam. The top staff of the score should be leading here.
This issue has come up before, and I’m sure it’s on the list to be improved eventually. Could be as soon as in the upcoming version 4, who knows. Until then, the solution is a manual adjustment in Engrave mode.
Optical spacing for cross-staff beaming is off by default in score layouts and on by default in part layouts. I think this is the best that can be done. For solo piano music using a score layout it does have to be switched on – but there are a few other reasons one might want to use a part layout for solo piano instead.