"Line" not appearing in Page View (only Continuous View)

• Oct 18, 2020 - 16:05
Reported version
3.5
Type
Graphical (UI)
Frequency
Once
Severity
S4 - Minor
Reproducibility
Always
Status
active
Regression
No
Workaround
Yes
Project

See attached score (Favela). The Flute instrument has a fat, translucent Line overlaid in an attempt to highlight the instrument in a multi-instrument score. I shows perfectly on the screen in Continuous view, but not in Page view. And it also does not appear after Export or Print.

This appears to be a regression, since I have a score (Moondance, attached) that I did this before with, including a PDF export. In fact, that older score, when opened in the current Musescore, still appears to be displaying and exporting properly.

So it's not clear to me what's going on.

Attachment Size
Favela.mscz 37.61 KB
Van_Morrison_-_Moondance_(DHK_PIANO_EDIT).mscz 128.03 KB

Comments

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

Title "Line" not appearing in Export or Print "Line" not appearing in Page View (only Continuous View)

Yes, thanks. I didn't realize that it was not appearing in Page View until an hour or so ago.

So then the bug isn't about Export/Print, but about Page View. I will update the issue.

Regression Yes No
Workaround No Yes

I think "Hide empty staves" is preventing the line from ever starting. Just be sure to start the line in a measure that actually displays,. You;ll also need to make sure to disable automatic placement for all the segments of the line. Probably best to add the line while in page view.

Not a regression as far as I can tell - the other score didn't have hide empty staves to confuse the picture. A regression doesn't mean a difference between one score and another, it means a difference between one version of MuseScore and another, even when following the same steps with the same score.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Thanks for the reply!

>>> I think "Hide empty staves" is preventing the line from ever starting. Just be sure to start the line in a measure that actually displays,.

Aha, that worked. But don't you think that's a bug? Hide Empty Staves is smart enough to evaluate each System dynamically to determine if it should display the staff. Why shouldn't the Line also be evaluated with each System?

>>> You;ll also need to make sure to disable automatic placement for all the segments of the line.

Okay, thanks. Is there a way to Disable Automatic Placement before I add (just) the Line? Would be nice to not have to reposition each segment individually in the future. As far as I'm concerned, it's one uniform line. Anyway.

>>> Probably best to add the line while in page view.

Thanks, I did.

>>> Not a regression as far as I can tell - the other score didn't have hide empty staves to confuse the picture.

Gotcha.

>>>A regression doesn't mean a difference between one score and another, it means a difference between one version of MuseScore and another, even when following the same steps with the same score.

I understand. I've been developing software for 40 years ;-) The reason I provided that score is because it was the only other one I had used the "line" trick on and which was created using the prior version of MS.

HOWEVER, we're not out of the woods. Everything looks perfect now in both Page View and Continuous View when showing all Instruments. But my real use for this "Line" highlighting trick is for when I eliminate all Instruments but Flute and Piano. Since the Flute comes and goes via Hide Empty Staves, that helps us see things better. BUT, when I turn off all but Flute and Piano, the offset gets all screwed up again.

I am attaching the updated version of this score.

Thanks!

Dave

Attachment Size
Favela.mscz 38.14 KB

I agree it seems a bug, although we'd need to study it more to be sure it really is a valid use case. In particular, if you add the line in page view and the start point actually has notes, I don't think the problem exists, right? Except I guess the second problem involving offset, which is likely to be mostly unrelated, but again we need to to do more investigation.

No way I know of to disable autoplace for the whole line before adding it, because the whole line doesn't even exist yet. But you can certainly easily apply that or any setting to all such lines via right-click, Select / All Similar Elements etc.

I need to add an additional twist on this bug. Whether it's the same bug or a different one will require a Software Engineer to comment.

I mentioned above that switching other instruments on/off messed up the Line offset.

I will now point out that even just switching between Page View and Continues view (but not changing the Instruments displayed; just working with Flute & Piano) causes the Line offsets to get messed up again (and undo doesn't fix it, either).

Further, it's not only the vertical offset that is getting reset, but also the horizontal anchor points are also getting reset. Basically, almost all my work keeps getting undone whenever I change either the view or the instrument selection.

>>> In particular, if you add the line in page view and the start point actually has notes, I don't think the problem exists, right?

Just to follow up on the question, I think I answered this above: yes, when I moved the starting point of the line to a measure that actually has notes, it did start to display (I don't recall if it was page view or continuous).

But to make my life easy, I was just adding this line on the Flute instrument from the beginning of the score to the end. And since the flute didn't start in right away, the whole line disappeared (with Hide Empty Staves enabled). So that's the "use case": highlighting the entire instrument's staff so I can tell what I'm looking at on a sheet, regardless of when notes are actually played.

While the result is now cleaner, it was a good bit more work to go into each system and hand-slide the anchors to exclude noteless regions in order to workaround this bug.

Thanks.