Better / more selective graphic excerpt export
MuseScore has improved by leaps and bounds since the last time I tried it a couple years ago. Congrats to all the devs, and keep up the awesome work!
One thing that is still missing, and which is an absolutely vital feature for educators, is the ability to quickly export a *limited portion* of a score into a standard graphic format such as PNG for use in Word, OO Writer, GIMP, PowerPoint / Impress, etc. It seems the only way to get an excerpt out of MuseScore right now is to save the entire score into SVG or PDF format. I have also not had much luck with the SVG export, personally, although I reckon this is just a fonts issue on my systems.
It seems the only current option is to export a PDF of the complete score in WYSIWYG / full-page format, trim out the unwanted parts of the PDF in an external editor, and save into another format with said editor. As far as I can tell, this would also be the case with an SVG export; you will get the whole score presented as a page / as pages, or nothing. This is extremely tedious for someone who needs to make a test or worksheet with 5-20+ notated examples that are much smaller than a full printed page, and who may not be able or willing to design the entire test or worksheet inside MuseScore itself.
As I imagine the devs already know, one of the two big commercial players in notation has a special graphic-selection mode that enables direct copying and pasting between the notation app and other applications. You draw a box around the portion of the score needing export, and a quick paste into the target app is all that is additionally needed. I am not sure if this would be practical with MuseScore's design, or if this method of graphic export is somehow patented. The other big commercial player still allows you to select a portion of the page with a user-drawn box and save just that portion as an EPS or TIFF file. This is slightly more tedious, but still a huge improvement over MuseScore's current handling.
Perhaps a special graphic-export mode could also be implemented in MuseScore to allow "box selection" and selective export into a few standard formats, including some of the usual raster-graphics suspects (PNG / JPG / etc.). It really would be a boon for those of us who are teaching or doing scholarly work.
Comments
It's indeed a nice feature to have.
In the meantime, you can choose white as your background score color in Preferences and hide all the non printable elements in display -> Hide frames. Then you can use a tool such as Clip2Net to do a capture of a part of your screen and paste it in another software such as OpenOffice.
In reply to It's indeed a nice feature to by [DELETED] 5
Thanks, lasconic. That's definitely another possible workaround, but it's actually more steps than simply hacking a PDF, especially if you need something for print rather than on-screen display (have to zoom in enough to get a halfway decent printworthy resolution and hopefully get rid of beam aliasing). I've admittedly been spoiled by the commercial competition in this department... once you can copy / Alt-Tab / paste, it's hard to go back to exporting / cropping / reexporting or etc. :)
In reply to Thanks, lasconic. That's by lossfabulous
I usually export the whole page to PNG then insert the file in Word and crop using the cropping tool in Word.
I use this same technique when I'm using MuseScore or Finale.