Using less stretch in version 1.0

"automagically" :P

I definitely found the variety of sizing options confusing at first, although I have to say, now that I'm more familiar with the options available, I don't think I'd want to give up any of the existing controls. They all do something different, and each of them is important to have control over. It's just that it's a bit overwhelming until you figure it out, and it doesn't help that the different options that control overall sizing are scattered in four or five different places. So for the novice user, a "smart" resize that automatically figured out what to do to squeeze more or less music onto a page would be kind of cool. I doubt it would be easy, nor would I expect it to be perfect, and - dare I say - sounds like perhaps the job for a plug-in, if the architecture supported modifying all the relevant parameters. But it seems potentially worthwhile to think about some day.

Here's my understanding of the sizing parameters and how they interact. Perhaps we could use this as the basis for a handbook page or other documentation. Note that most of these can be negative numbers, which can occasionally be useful.

Layout->Page Settings->Left/Right/Top/Bottom Margins: these are the usual page margins.

Layout->Page Settings->Space: this directly controls the amount of space between the lines of the staff, but most other elements (notes, clefs, even text in some cases) will also be scaled accordingly. You can also make other sizes and distances scale if you specify them in units of "sp" as opposed to "mm" (eg, make it so that shrinking the staff size also reduces the amount of space between staves).

Style->Edit General Style->Page->Music upper margin: amount of space between the bottom of the top page margin and the top line of the first staff. It also controls the space between a vertical frame and the top line of the first staff that follows, although there is an additional user-controllable amount of padding that can be added to that (see V-frame lower margin).

Style->Edit General Style->Page->Music lower margin: amount of space between the bottom of the last staff and top of the bottom page margin. It also controls the space between a staff and a vertical frame that follows.

Style->Edit General Style->Page->Staff distance: the distance between staves within a single system. If the music has only a single staff per system (eg, a lead sheet, or music for most individual instruments other than keyboard instruments), this parameter has no effect.

Style->Edit General Style->Page->System distance: the distance between systems. For music with just one staff per system, this is basically the distance between staves. Note that the distance between systems will be increased to fill out the page if the page exceeds the Page fill threshold (see below).

Style->Edit General Style->Page->Page fill threshold: MuseScore puts as many systems on a page as it can according to the above parameters. If that would result in the page exceeding this fill threshold, then extra space is added between systems to fill out the page, so that the bottom of the last staff plus the music lower margin reaches the bottom page margin.

Style->Edit General Style->Page->V-frame upper margin: it seems to me this should allow you to add more or less space between a system and a vertical frame that follows (analogous to V-frame lower margin, below), but it does not appear to do anything that I can see. Either I am misunderstanding, or this is a bug in 1.0.

Style->Edit General Style->Page->V-frame lower margin: in addition to the space controlled by music upper margin, this allows you to add more (or less) space between a vertical frame and the first staff that follows.

Style->Edit General Style->Last system fill threshold: if the last system exceeds this threshold, it is stretched out to reach the right margin.

Style->Measure->Spacing: controls the basic spacing between notes. I am not sure what, if anything, the units represent, but clearly, lower values squeeze the notes closer together; larger values stretch them further out.

Style->Measure->Min. note distance: the minimum distance between notes. With this set to 0 and the above measure spacing set to 1, notes practically touch each other.

Style->Measure->Left/Right Margin: space after and before the barlines

Measure Properties->Layout stretch: a factor that is multiplied by the global measure spacing (see above) to override the spacing in any particular measure.

Layout->Add More/Less Stretch: this seems to be a shortcut for setting the above layout stretch factor for the selected measures.

Whew - a lot of parameters, but each serves a very distinct purpose. So again, now way would I want to give any of that control up. But a "smart" algorithm to reduce the overall size of the music by cleverly reducing the overall space factor and.or system distance and/or stretch, and conversely to increase the size of music by increasing those parameters, could be interesting. To some extent, the intent seems to be that the very first of these parameters - Layout-Page Settings->Space - is that smart parameter, as most other parameters are expressed in units of "sp". So in many cases, that's all you'd want to mess with. In practice, though, playing with stretch too seems inevitable.