Spacing with chord symbols

[jan]

Fred, thanks for your input!
I think your system 3 and 4 are both good and valid solutions. On a big band standard or leadsheet (which even usually is in 4/4), I'd prefer system 4 where (nearly all of) the slashes have the same distance. If it has many time sig changes, system 3 might be better to the reader. Though I think that rhythmic difficult situations combined with slash notation should be avoid anyway (maybe use rhythmic notation instead?).

From a Finale point of view there is another difficulty that is not visible in your leadsheet. That is (invisible) notes under the slash notation which were entered for playback reasons. If they have a different rhythm than the slashes, Finale will include them in its spacing algorithm and make very uneven slashes even though "Hidden notes" were excluded included in the document options. Old Finale bug...

[Fred G. Unn]

On a big band standard or leadsheet (which even usually is in 4/4), I'd prefer system 4 where (nearly all of) the slashes have the same distance.

Hi Jan,
My only problem with system 4 is that I routinely have to use a mix of basic slashes and rhythmic slashes, and system 4 is pretty close to the spacing for dotted quarter - eighth. For that reason I personally am less inclined to use the "Avoid Collision of Chords" solution unless absolutely necessary.

ChordSpacing2.jpg (564.52 KiB) Viewed 10283 times

[jan]

Good point! Especially when you use the same slash symbols as noteheads for the rhythm notation.

[Fred G. Unn]

Here's an issue I ran into again today with longer chord symbols, where sometimes really the only option is to create an opaque expression and break the barline:

Just Friends Score pg5.jpg (2.53 MiB) Viewed 10264 times

Jan, if you came up with a plug-in that could automate that in some way, I'd buy it as soon as it was available!

[jan]

Thanks for the input. Yes, this is automatable ... I'll see what I can do.

[Fred G. Unn]

Thanks for the input. Yes, this is automatable ... I'll see what I can do.

Great!