System-Break Courtesy Accidentals

Standard practice in many house styles is to show a courtesy accidental at the start of a new system when a tied note continues across a system break. In traditional notation workflows, this is handled manually: the engraver adds or forces the accidental after layout.

That manual step has consequences. A courtesy accidental has width. Adding it can push spacing past a threshold, move a system break, or reflow measures. A small local correction can trigger a cascade elsewhere, sending the engraver back to the same passage again. This is not a matter of care or skill. It is a side effect of heuristic layout combined with post-hoc correction.

Ooloi takes a different path.

Courtesy accidentals that exist because of a system or page break are derived, not edited. Ooloi has user settings to control preferred behaviour – such as whether these accidentals appear at all system breaks, page breaks only, or not at all. The required space is known before layout begins. System and page breaks are explicit decisions, and the distribution pass incorporates these accidentals exactly once.

Edit the score and the layout is recomputed.
Change a preference and the layout is recomputed.

There is no iterative correction loop, no heuristic adjustment, and no manual cleanup phase. Layout-dependent notation is a deterministic consequence of the score, its breaks, and the engraver’s stated preferences.

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