Add option to make the measures of a system of equal width
Reported version
3.4
Type
Functional
Frequency
Many
Severity
S5 - Suggestion
Reproducibility
Always
Status
duplicate
Regression
No
Workaround
Yes
Project
Although contrary to common practice, this feature would be very handy on educational contexts, when making theory explanations or practice exercises. Moreover, some contemporary music writers could find it useful.
I don't know how to code, but would it be easier to implement this if the region where you could apply this setting was between system breaks?
There's a -limited- workaround by @Ziya Mete Demircan at https://musescore.org/en/node/121771
It's been requested a few more times:
https://musescore.org/en/node/120566
https://musescore.org/en/node/121771
https://musescore.org/en/node/167411
https://musescore.org/en/node/281100
https://musescore.org/en/node/296191
Comments
Yes, this is something we're looking at for a future release. We used to have an option for this but it didn't work well and caused problems, so it was removed. I don't think it would be that hard to add back a version that works better.
BTW, there are actually several different but related aspects to this:
1) a setting that just says, however many bars are on a given system, make them the same width
2) a setting that says, forces all systems to X measures (whether they "fit" or not)
3) a setting for a particular measure to specify its width in absolute terms (whether done numerically or dragging a barline or whatever)
Of these, 1) and 3) are the "easy" ones - doable, I think, within the current layout algorithm. Number 2) - forcing X measures to fit on a system - is tougher without more significant changes to how we do horizontal spacing.
BTW, for 1) and 2), these could potentially be style settings so they apply score-wide, but at least as interesting I think would be to allow this to be specified per-system, perhaps as a property on a system break. Especially 2), this would allow you to force extra measures onto a given system here or there.
and IIRC option 2) was the one that resulting in the entire thing to get removed for MuseScore 2.x
MuiseScore 1 had settings for both 1 & 2. The setting for 2) was kind of useless because it was completely global and gave no ability to specify how you wanted to count handle a pickup measure or voltas, etc. But aside from that, it also suffered the same issue as 1), where depending on your settings, you'd end up with measures that simply don't fit on the system or notes that don't fit within their measures, leading to crazy nonsense.
In reply to MuiseScore 1 had settings… by Marc Sabatella
I certainly miss something but I can't understand how option 3 could be easy and option 2 difficult?
Once option 3 is implemented, wouldn't option 2 just be using option 3 on all measures with size=system width divided by desired number of measures by system ?
Well, it's easy to implement if you don't care how it actually looks, which was the problem with the original implementation.
See #313555: Fixed Measure Widths