Lyrics above staff cause staff spacing instability

The page below was spaced beautifully until I started typing some lyrics to be placed above the top staff of a system, whereupon each syllable I typed pushed the staff spacing into an even more extreme squash:

Note that the lyrics ‘I hate to leave you’, visible written across bar 2, actually belong to the soprano (upper) notes in bar 5!

I couldn’t fix the problem by using Undo, by manually deleting the added syllables, or by resetting spacing. Changing zoom or switching to Engrave mode also didn’t help. But, strangely, changing one of the options in View > Signposts (to show or hide a kind of signpost) caused Dorico to think for a couple of seconds, and then revert to this:

Can anyone else reproduce this?

(I wondered if it has anything to do with the repeat endings that coexist on the same line as the lyrics above the staff?)

Update: the problem continues to occur, with varying degrees of severity, as I make further edits to the music. It seems to be an issue with certain lines of lyrics pushing themselves further and further away from the staff to which they’re attached. Every time it happens, changing something on the View > Signposts menu makes it go away.

Yes, I’ve seen this too occasionally. For me cutting and immediately pasting the music again at the same spot fixed it.

Have you tried to play with the setting in Layout options > Vertical spacing > Justify distance only between systems when frame is at least XX% ?
I notice that if I put a quite high value, say 80 or 90 %, I do have the document with vertical justification between staves nicely put. I think it’s more important than justification between systems. This should give your lyrics some space. Of course, if what you’re experiencing is a bug, it might not help, but it’s worth a try.

Please zip up the project and attach it here together with steps for how to reproduce the spacing problem, and we’ll look into this. This kind of problem is not unheard of because of the complexity of trying to process as small a range of music as possible (to keep edits fast) and there being some kind of mismatch between the graphical area that actually ends up being edited and the rhythmic area that Dorico thinks has been edited.

Here is the problematic score, zipped up. To reproduce the problem in Dorico 2:

(1) Go to Write mode, Page view.
(2) Make some edits to the score on page 1. Unrelated lines of lyrics in different places (and the system track itself) begin to edge away from their rightful places.
(3) Undo the edits. The displaced items don’t return where they were.
(4) Choose an option from View > Signposts, or switch to Galley View and back again. Everything is corrected.

In step 2, a wide range of different edits cause this behaviour. The most consistent is to select a random note or passage on systems 2, 3 or 4 and use Alt+arrows to repitch it up and down. It is fun trying to guess which unrelated objects will start their upwards shuffle!

The bug does not occur unless some lyrics are set to be positioned above the staff.

Many thanks in advance for your help as always, Daniel.
spacing problem.dorico.zip (1.14 MB)

I have also experienced this with lyrics above the staff.

Thanks for attaching the project. I can reproduce the problem and will ask the team to take a look as soon as possible.

Hello. Is there any news concerning this problem ?
I noticed that if you change the setting, the lyrics come back to the right place, for a while …
But I can not spend my time changing frames :wink:
Thanks in advance.

This problem is fixed in the forthcoming update.

Thanks, Daniel.
Is there a date for this update ?

I believe the team has said the update will be here within a few weeks at the most.

Unless there are any last-minute problems (which is unfortunately always a possibility) the update should be with you before the end of this coming week.

:astonished: :stuck_out_tongue:

Thanks, Daniel !