Style → General... → Measure

> Any behavior other than this would be counter to how
> people would expect music to be laid out.

You know, through all these years I'd never noticed that before. I had to actually look at some music with an eye specifically toward this issue. But lo and behold, the first note is indeed closer to the beginning barline than the last note is to the end, if other considerations (such as a bunch of 32nd notes) don't trump the requirement. In my head I had always assumed that the beginning and end "margins" would be exactly the same, without ever taking the time to ascertain what was actually going on. Nonetheless, I doubt I'm alone. Entering music into Musescore is a much different ball-game than writing out a sheet with a pencil, and it cannot hurt to make everything as clear as possible. After all, if this were already crystalline, I wouldn't need to write it up.

Anyhow, since nobody else has piped up, I'm assuming all the preliminary votes are in. Here's the new tally, heavily revised. The commentary may strike some folks as too basic, but in my experience scarcity of information is almost always a much greater problem than its overabundance. When you don't have a page limit, it's always best to err on the side of more (as long as it's not needlessly verbose). Thus...

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Many Musescore users find it helpful to make measures longer for ease of reading. Others merely want a bit more distance between bar lines at the beginning and ends of measures. Whatever your pleasure, Style > General > Measure helpfully allows you to adjust the distance between a number of relevant items. Before beginning, however, you need to know about two things: 1) Musescore's general spacing behavior, and 2) the unit of measure Musescore uses in this dialog:

1. As you shrink or expand distances between notes and rests, Musescore will always attempt to keep the elements within each measure relatively spaced according to best engraving practice. The spacing commands you enter will always be secondary to this goal. In other words, you may specify a certain amount of space between notes, but Musescore will not apply your change in such a way as to make all notes perfectly equidistant. Such a result would conflict with convention. Per standard practice, Musescore will continue to allot less space to the right of shorter notes than longer notes. In addition, when you make changes, anchored elements retain their localized anchor points and are respaced accordingly so you need not worry about readjusting them separately (in other words, fingerings, string numbers, lines, and so forth which are anchored to notes or rests will be moved along with those notes or rests).
2. The unit of measurement Musescore uses to work with musical measures is the staff space, abbreviated sp. Without understanding the sp, you can't estimate the number of units necessary to create the distances you want. For a full description of the sp see Formatting > Page Settings > Staff space/scaling , but in brief, this unit of measurement is determined by the small, vertical distance from one individual line in a staff to another. So in order to decide how many sps to specify for a particular change in a measure, you'll need to take a good look that small vertical space and flip it over horizontally in your mind. You can then use that mental image of the horizontal sp to estimate how many of them your change will require.

Options

Minimum measure width:

Sets the minimum horizontal length of measures. In measures containing very little content (e.g., a single whole note or whole measure rest), the measure will only shrink as far as this minimum.

Spacing (1=tight):

Condenses or expands the space after notes or rests. This setting thus affects not only space between notes but also between the last note and the ending barline. For the space between the beginning of the measure and the first note or rest, see Barline to note distance (below). Note: Spacing is the basis for the Stretch commands, which you can also use to adjust measure size and the amount of space between notes.

Barline to note distance:

Sets the distance between the barline which begins a measure and the first note or rest in that measure. For measures at beginnings of lines, which start with clefs instead of barlines, use Clef/key right margin (below).

Barline to grace note distance and Barline to accidental note distance:

These options set the distance between a bar line and the special anchored elements of grace notes and accidentals. Anchored elements are ignored by Barline to note distance (above), so if you wish grace notes or accidentals to be as far away from the bar line as regular notes, you must use these settings separately to specify that same distance.

Minimum note distance:

Specifies the smallest amount of space Musescore will allow after each note (but depending on other factors, more space will be allowed).

Clef left margin:

Sets the distance between the very beginning of each line and the clef sign, starting at the clef sign and spacing backward. (There is little reason to use this option.)

Key signature left margin:

Sets the distance between the key signature and the clef sign. Begins at the key signature and spaces backward.

Time signature left margin:

Sets the distance between the time signature and the front matter preceding it (normally the key signature, but if there is none, then the clef sign). Begins at the time signature and spaces backward.

Clef/key right margin:

Sets the distance between the material at the beginning of each line (front matter such as the clef and key signature) and the first note or rest of the first measure, starting at the last symbol of the front matter and spacing forward. (Note: this option's name omits the time signature and thus implies that the time signature is ignored when computing distance. That is a misleading implication. If a time signature is present, it is the element from which the spacing begins.)

Clef to barline distance:

CURRENTLY NOT WORKING.

Multimeasure rest margin:

This sets the distance between a multimeasure rest and the bar lines on either side.

Staff line thickness:

Makes the lines on the staff thicker (and thus darker, if you need greater visibility on your printouts).

NOTE CONCERNING THE FIRST TWO OPTIONS ABOVE, Minimum measure width AND Spacing (1=tight): These are the workhorse settings of the Measure dialog, the ones you'll almost always use. But some scores are simple, featuring few notes of differing duration (lead sheets or fake books, for example, often have quarter and eighth notes with nothing else). In such cases there is little reason to alter both of these settings simultaneously because Musescore's general spacing behavior means that you can achieve similar results with either of them. However, if your score is more complex, with halves, quarters, eighths, sixteenths well intermixed, then you'll need to decide on a balance between these options. As you do so, it is easy to ignore the "minimum" part of Minimum measure width and simply regard it as a setting that keeps all measures the same size. Avoid this mistake by always remembering the name's qualifier: the width is not absolute but rather a minimum. Minimum measure width, in other words, will always be subject to Musescore's basic spacing behavior as well as the requirement imposed by Spacing (1=tight). If you have more notes than will fit in the minimum width you've specified, or if Spacing (1=tight) is set high, Musescore will be forced to go beyond--perhaps well beyond--your Minimum measure width. An example will show how forgetting this can trip you up. Let's say you want to keep all your measures more or less the same size. If the first part of your score has only quarter notes and a few eighths, you may be tempted to set Spacing (1=tight) to, say, 2, which (depending on accidentals) will give you three to five measures per line if all other settings are left at default. Then you make the mistake of assuming that Minimum measure width will condense notes as necessary to keep measures the same size, trumping your setting for Spacing (1=tight). Thus in order to maintain uniformity no matter what happens, you set Minimum measure width to 20. That all works nicely for a page or so, but then you come in for a rude awakening. On the second page you have a sudden run of 16th notes filling a measure, and, oops, that measure turns out to span an entire line. It doesn't matter what you put into Minimum measure width because, again, that setting is a minimum, not a maximum. There is no maximum, which means that Musescore's general spacing behavior will always apply, as will the setting in Spacing (1=tight). The bottom line is this: if having notes a good distance apart is more important than having the measures be equally sized, then you'll want to increase Spacing (1=tight); if having the measures the same size is more important, then you'll wish to set Minimum measure width to your desired size and then reduce Spacing (1=tight) down to its minimum of 1 (Musescore won't allow you to go below that, as notes would soon run together). Within those two broad parameters, you'll most likely need to experiment until you find the settings that work best for the particular characteristics of the piece you're working on.

OK, I've waited nearly a week and the gamblin' man (You don't live "down in New Orleans", d'ya Zack? ;) has offered the only response, so I'm assuming all other parties concerned are fine with the text as is.

Yes, the introductory sentence is perhaps more appropriate for a tutorial than for a stripped-down, nothing-but-nuts-and-bolts manual; and the last paragraph does offer unabashed advice (of the kind I wished had been available when I first approached measures in Musescore). However, I strongly disagree with that characterization of the two beginning points (the list items). 1 & 2 offer information about how Musescore works, pure and simple; they don't tell users what to do with that information, and the handbook is definitely the place for it. Well, I guess the last two sentences in 2, about mentally readjusting sp horizontally, might be construed as "advice", but it's so fundamental to the usage of this dialog that IMHO it needs to stay. So I have now added everything to the handbook except the first sentence & last paragraph.

Re these final pieces of text: I am going to have to just leave it sitting here. If anyone else wishes to take up Zack's suggestion to put it elsewhere or use it as a tutorial springboard, please feel free. As I indicated above, I'm too busy at the moment to actually be doing stuff like this; it would be a very serious problem for me if I don't get my dissertation done. So I can't pursue this further. Others who can have my full blessing to alter the text in whatever manner they wish without feeling that I ought to be notified even for courtesy's sake.