Chord and fretboard bugs
This illustrates a few bugs with chords and fretboards:
First, as noted at https://musescore.org/en/node/167096 , although a chord symbol can be placed at any point in a measure, a fretboard diagram can only be placed attached to a note or rest. The workaround to (in this case) enter two quarter notes in the last two beats of the first measure, attach fretboard diagrams to each, and then replace the first quarter note with a half note works, but is needlessly cumbersome and inconsistent with the way chord symbols work.
Second, chord symbol widths at the end of a bar are not properly taken into account in layout, so for instance the Dm7b5 symbol collides with the following C symbol.
Third, chord symbols, notes, and fretboard diagrams should be center aligned horizontally and they are not.
Fourth, when a fretboard diagram is attached to an empty measure, it is drawn centered over the bar line. Is this correct? It looks wrong to me.
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Comments
All valid Points and should proably get reported in the issue tracker
Related to the third issue...
Apparently, for six string fretboard diagrams, chord names are centered. For ukulele see:
https://musescore.org/en/node/123086
Regards.
In reply to Related to the third by Jm6stringer
Ah, I learned from that link there's a text alignment option for chord symbols. Changing the alignment to center helps. I would think that should be the default.
It doesn't center exactly, though, presumably because, as you say, six string fretboards are assumed. That I think is legitimately a bug.
It is known that the automatic chord symbol avoidance algorithm for 2.0 only works within a bar. There were complications getting it to work across bars in 2.0. 3.0 has a fundamentally different layout algorithm, so potentially we would be able to make this work there, but so far this hasn't happened.
Note that once you actually add notes to those measures, you're unlikely to actually notice overlaps. but if you do, you can either move chords manually, increase stretch in a measure to widen it, or play with the settings in Style / General / Chord Symbols to control what how much space is allowed for chord symbols that potentially overlap barlines.
This is already in the tracker as #25278: Chord symbols won't overlap barline
In reply to It is known that the by Marc Sabatella
I do indeed have real world examples of severe collisions like this. Moving chord symbols manually displaces them from where they should be with respect to the notes, so that's not very satisfactory, and increasing stretch widens the entire measure, creating too much space elsewhere.
#25278 was actually sort of the opposite: apparently the complaint was about chord symbols not crossing a bar line in circumstances when it would have been desirable. If I'm reading it right this was addressed by creating the "Maximum barline distance" parameter. Setting this low enough allows the chord symbol to cross the bar line — where it can collide with another symbol. And indeed, cranking this up to a high enough value fixes the collision in my example.
Of course, center aligning the chord symbol helps too.
In reply to I do indeed have real world by Richard S. Holmes
Yes, that issue was originally about the opposite problem. As a partial solution, we implemented the option I mentioned to control space before the baseline. But there is no way currently to get what we really want - chord symbols that overlap the harmine unless they collide with a chord in the next measure.
Part of the problem is there is no one obviously correct solution. Although the methods you mention can work in some cases, not so well in others. So in the end there probably will be no getting around the need for manual adjustment sometimes.