OT: Sibelius default output is ugly

[motet]

I'm playing some orchestral music that looks like it was done in Sibelius--it's fairly ugly. So I thought I would fire up my copy of Sibelius 6, which I've never used, to is if its default output really is that ugly. It is!

The rests can be pulled down manually to shorten the stems. The accidentals, to my eye, are much too close to the barline. In the orchestral music I'm playing, this makes it hard to read.

Perhaps there are settings to fix these--I don't know from Sibelius--but this makes me glad to have chosen Finale.

[RMK]

There is a plug-in that fixes this.

But you are right - Sibelius should handle this automatically, as do Finale and Dorico.

[motet]

If you drag down the rest, Sibelus evidently behaves as though the sixteenth beam were all the way across, and so doesn't allow the rest up as high as Finale does.

I'm sure part of my distaste is just that I'm used to Finale's output, though.

[Vaughan]

I also agree that Sibelius' accidentals are too close to barlines directly in front of them. Funny how these priorities work. Finale has several settings for this, but its settings for grace notes are meagre and don't cover all contingencies. Sibelius deals with grace notes better. On the whole, I don't think Finale's defaults are very good, either, although they have been improving a bit. Most of us have painstakingly made our own defaults after years of experimentation. I'm sure it's the same for Sibelius (and Dorico) users.