In general the Perfect Layout aligns
- dynamic and expressive text expressions below the staff horizontally and vertically
- tempo and rehearsal marks and tempo alterations above the staff horizontally and vertically
- leaves all other expressions untouched.
Usually the plug-in first removes any manual adjustments, then looks for collisions and, should it detect any, moves the expression away from the colliding object.
If the horizontal offsets of the expressions are huge, then it is unlikely that a clear zero position was intended by the engraver. In this case manual (horizontal) adjustments are not removed.
The
thresholds for "huge offsets" can be set in "
Reset Horizontal Position of Dynamics Until Maximum Horizontal Offset" and "
dito., Max. Horizontal Resset Offset for Whole or Dotted Notes".
Dynamic expressions in
staves with lyrics are very often placed above the staff, these are currently not taken into account for alignment.
The option "
Reset Vertical Position of Dynamics and Expressive Text on Notes With Lyrics" is switched off by default. If selected, dynamics above the staff will suddenly appear below the staff line if they were taken from the default dynamics category and it is still set to below baseline.
Some expressions usually
only appear in the parts, to not mess up the conductor's score. These expressions must be placed in a user-defined category containing the keywords defined in "
Hide Expressions in Score with Category Keyword(s)".
E.g. if you name the expression category "In Parts Only" and enter the keywords "part,only", then the plug-in will hide all expressions from categories with names that includes these keywords.

Image 1: Category "In Parts Only"