NOTATIO

From another thread:

Knut wrote:Sorry, John. I missed that because of your positive first reaction.

Anyway, Dorico does indeed provide settings for this as well as a couple related cases:

Skjermbilde 2016-10-24 kl. 23.19.55.png (437.12 KiB) Viewed 11939 times

How does Dorico handle this by default? I think Finale makes mistake by forcing to overdrive spacing.

I agree that Finale's spacing is wrong. Here's Dorico:

By the default?

That's correct!

Actually, I like Finale's spacing better, provided you move both sixteenth A's a bit to the right. The Dorico spacing of the bottom staff too irregular for me.

I think that the spacing is determined by the smallest value, even when they are moved. Right?

RMK wrote:Actually, I like Finale's spacing better, provided you move both sixteenth A's a bit to the right. The Dorico spacing of the bottom staff too irregular for me.

Interesting.

Dorico seems to take the tradidional approach. Perhaps Finale can be said to have a modem take?

There are two things about spacing going on here: allocation and justification. Dorico’s allocation is far superior to Finale’s. There is no good reason for the first & second 16ths to be closer together than the others; Finale fails to allocate enough space for the second between the voices. My usual way of correcting uneven spacing in Finale (go into the beat chart and delete the middle marker) doesn’t work in this case because the first 16th does need more space. It can only be tweaked by hand, which is SO cumbersome and imprecise.

Finale’s justification is “modern” in that it works by inserting an equal proportion of extra space after every beat position on a system. Old-fashioned grid spacing, as done by hand by engravers, is much more pleasing to my eye, because it gives preference to spaces that are more important to the rhythm and the flow of music.

If you feel the Dorico example above is too uneven, keep in mind that it is minimized horizontally in galley [scroll] view. Any stretch due to justification begins to even it out. This is where Dorico’s justification is also better than Finale’s.

At reasonable staff size, I prefer the notes of the second closer together (as Finale does, with stems aligning), and indeed Dorico has a setting for that.

I agree with MJCube.

Finale's spacing of the seconds with the stems aligning, seems standard to me. Dorico's handling of the general spacing is also standard. I don't understand why Dorico would have its default for seconds set so wide because it exaggerates the unevenness of the 1/8th notes, when it should instead be hiding it. With this setting corrected, the Dorico layout would be the winner for me. Maybe Knut might want to show what that would look like.

FWIW, LilyPond follows the same logic as Dorico. MuseScore seems to follow Finale's approach by spacing the lower staff notes more evenly and pushing the first pair of 16th notes together. I'm not a computer with Sibelius or SCORE to see what they do. Any takers?

As a side note, you might get away with the best of both worlds with a little bit of fudge-factor by shifting the second 16th slightly right and the fourth 16th slightly left to even out those 16th runs: