I didn't look at your file yet, David, but from Rafael's subsequent
comment and your reply, it sounds like it's the exact same thing I saw
on a file that Andrew Levin sent to me directly. That is, the
discrepancy in spacing is due to the need to accommodate leger lines on
one staff but not on the other.
If all these grace note discrepancies are something of this nature,
then the situation is fairly straightforward. I think that several of
us, including me, were pre-disposed to suspect larger problems, due to
our memories from earlier versions of the program when grace note
spacing was significantly screwed up. But in current versions of
Finale, although some grace note spacing is initially unexpected, it
make logical sense within the confines of how Finale treats grace
notes.
The key to remember about grace notes is that their position is not
directly linked to the beat chart. The beat chart is what makes all
your non-grace notes align, and the grace notes are outside of that.
Every grace note is linked to the beat that it leads to, and then if
there's more than one grace note, they count backward from there.
A grace note's position follows an algorithm that calculates how far to
the left of its beat it needs to be. Since they all follow the same
algorithm, grace notes with identical rhythms ought to have identical
positions. Most of the time they do. When they differ, it's because
there is an external factor affecting the amount of space needed and
this factor is present in one system but not in the other.
One external factor, as we've seen, is the need to accommodate a ledger
line. Other possibilities are accidentals, articulations, lyrics, etc
-- pretty much anything that affects music spacing. You're not very
likely to attach lyrics to grace notes, but if you do, then a grace
note on a vocal line with a syllable attached is going to push to the
left to accommodate the syllable, whereas in the same line on an
instrumental part, the grace note won't be pushed, so they won't align.
I think the most common discrepancies are going to be due to ledger
lines or accidentals. The one we've seen. For the other, imagine you
have a line with two grace notes going up to the big note. In one
instrument it goes B C# D, while in the other it goes D E F. If we
assume that C# is not in the key signature, then that sharp will need
to appear before the second grace note on the first line. The second
line does not require an accidental.
In a situation like this, there's really two questions. One is how to
make the grace notes align (since by default they won't). The other is
to ask yourself if you even want them to align. I'm not convinced that
you will. In this case, to make the grace notes align, the second line
is going to have a big ugly gap where the first line needs space for
the sharp. If the two systems are adjacent, it might look OK, but if
one is a flute at the top of the staff and the other is a violin
several staves down, it might not look so nice when looking at just the
strings. Do we really care about grace notes aligning horizontally in
such a case, or does Finale have a good point in choosing to treat the
two independently?
With ledger lines, it's a subtler difference, so you might well draw a
different conclusion, but even there it's not obvious to me that you'll
always want to spread out grace notes for an instrument just because
some other instrument has a parallel line requiring ledger lines. Off
the top of my head, I'd think that if it's at the beginning of a
measure or on a significant beat, I don't want them to align, since I'd
rather that the staff with the tighter spacing is allowed to stay
tight. If, on the other hand, the grace notes appear in the middle of
a set of beamed notes (as they do in the example Andrew sent me), so
that the tighter spacing is just going to result in a big ugly gap in
front of the graces instead, then I think I do want them to align.
In any case, whether you like it or not, when two parallel lines of
grace notes have external factors differently affecting their spacing,
Finale will by default display them unaligned. So if you don't like the
result, your question will be how to fix it so that they do align.
Once you understand the logic that causes the misalignment, the
solutions suggest themselves, so I don't think I need to spell out
procedures. Rafael already mentioned the option of turning ledger lines
on or off in the Music Spacing Options. A more general solution is to
decide which of the two alignments you prefer. Temporarily edit the
other line to match, space them both so that they align, then edit the
other line back to how it should be and never respace those measures
again.
So, for example, in the case that Andrew sent me, where the flute and
clarinet are playing octaves apart with ledger lines for the flute and
none for the clarinet, the solution is to transpose the clarinet's
measure up an octave, respace that measure so that the clarinet grace
notes spread out to match the flutes, then transpose the measure back
down and don't respace.
Admittedly, this isn't any help to anyone who habitually works with
Automatic Music Spacing turned on. I guess I assume that anyone who
cares about good spacing always works with that turned off, precisely
because of things like this.
mdl
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