NOTATIO

Also, I asked for a feature enhancement - specifically, I find that the accidentals need to be slightly further away from the notehead when a note has a ledger line, otherwise they look closer to the note than they are (because the eye visually groups the note together with the ledger line). Daniel ...

I do not understand why, in the earlier Dorico versions of measure 7, the 5th and 7th 16th-notes are kerned under the preceding notehead, but not the 3rd 16th-note. That makes the spacing look very irregular. I think I can explain why this is happening. I believe Dorico is trying to avoid collision...

Update: Was able to fix the spacing in m. 7 by increasing the "minimum distance between adjacent rhythmic items" to 2 1/2 spaces, under Engraving Options->Spacing Gaps (the bottommost setting). I don't know if this will have a bad effect somewhere else.

OK, here is the full first page of NicholasG's notation, with my settings tweaks applied. I increased the accidental spacing as well. I had to decrease the tie height adjustment for short ties back to the default, because then the really short ties in the right hand in the bottom system looked stupi...

It's also set up to allow as much music on each system as possible, which is why accidentals and notes appear too close in certain types of music if left as is. By comparison, Finale's accidental spacing can become quite unpleasant in tight spacing situations. The Finale engraved Nocturne in questi...

That is a marked improvement and very encouraging. It looks more like software that I could actually use. But given all the care that has gone into Dorico, I don't understand why its default settings are so out of whack. Along with the problems that you have corrected: 1. the accidentals and note h...

Here is another edited example, took the last one, added the missing tie and text/dynamics, and reduced the "staff line thickness" and "bar line thickness" settings. I also adjusted the "slur thickness" (lowered it to make it look more like FInale) and increased the tie...

Here, I got the default slurs in Dorico to look a bit better for those figures with Engraving Options changes (defaults in the program): adjustedslurs.PNG The settings I used were "Maximum distance to move endpoints to avoid collisions" reduced from the default to 1 space, and "Maximu...

I believe that is the default SIbelius style, which is what I typically use.

He said "the other software", presumably meaning Sibelius. This looks to me like Sibelius default output, which is what I use all the time.