Vertical spacing in 3.6 is a problem

• Jan 22, 2021 - 02:25

I upgraded to 3.6. I saved my style under a new name and reset everything to defaults. I then turned vertical justification off. The problem I have is that the vertical spacing is now much much greater than before. Because I perform from images on an iPad this is a real problem as the iPad will be forced to make new pieces smaller to fit them in. (It also is ugly, but that is an opinion not a fact.)

Could someone point me to the settings that are forcing this spacing? I m tearing my hair out.

Thanks!

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• Jan 22, 2021 - 03:58

Normally it's a good thing that MuseScore tries to spaces scores more readabily and more in accord with standards for print music. But it's true you might want to override those defaults to create layout specific for the dimensions of your iPad screen. So, set the page dimensions you want in Format / Page Settings, and set the staff spacing you want in Format / Style / Page. In your case for this particular score, you probably want to disable the staff spread and then make sure you have values you like for staff and system distances. If you create scores in this format often, probably best to then save the result to your Templates folder for easy reuse every time you create a new score.

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• Jan 22, 2021 - 09:28

Marc, with respect, that is an awfully impractical answer as it would box me into a corner and require switching between, and maintaining three style sheets, minimum: one for pieces that fit the iPad better in portrait, one for landscape, and one for printing. I have never needed that before. And I really don’t think that MS is acting, in this case, more in accord with the standards of print music, at least not the standards for writing music in the traditional music world or jazz lead sheet world. I could go into my music room and pick up a hundred books that look like my more close-spaced score, and zero that look like the 3.6 defaults. Were this an orchestral score, or even

Second, I don’t think that the example using the defaults is either more readable than using the style that I have been using as my default and I do think that is noticeably less attractive.

Third, it also would result in appearance both inconsistent with a hundred or so traditional tunes I have notated and moved to the iPad plus dozens of original tunes on my web site, and inconsistent between new tunes notate that require 4 lines and those that require 5 or 6.

What I am looking for is being pointed to the setting which, when set to the new default in v3.6, have resulted in this behavior. I have looked at length, unsuccessfully. If no one can identify it, I will be forced to keep using the style sheet originally developed in an older version and not take advantage of nee features/settings offered in the new release, at least not by following the recommendation to start by resetting to defaults or using the dialig box that asks, essentially, if I want to use the new features.

So ... is disabling “staff spread” different from disabling vertical justification, which is already disabked? If so, where is it set?

Thanks.

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• Jan 25, 2021 - 00:54

Indeed, part of this has been answered. I just want to respond to one aspect in particular here: your statement that "I could go into my music room and pick up a hundred books that look like my more close-spaced score, and zero that look like the 3.6 defaults". I would challenge you to try that experiment :-)/ The default spacing was developed by consulting with hundreds of scores over many genres of music.

However, it is true that of all the music genres in the world, and all the publishers in the world, and all the eras of history in the world, there is a subset of this in which staves are not typically spread. This is the exception, not the rule, overall, but in music coming from a world where everything was handwritten on pre-printed staff paper with a fixed number of staves per page, that did become a thing. For instance, the Real Book series of jazz fakebooks. So if you are trying to emulate that particular style when writing in that particular genre, by all means, set things up the way you like and save the result as a template.

But for most music in most of the world, the spread really is a good thing and brings MuseScore more in line with the norms of published music across all genres through the centuries.

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• Jan 25, 2021 - 02:34

Here ... in fairness, though, I work primarily in a number of folk traditions, although I am including a bit of Telemann and some 17th c. recorder music, and I never work with orchestral scores. These were literally the books on top of the most-used pile.

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• Jan 25, 2021 - 03:42

Right, but a) all of these show only music of a single staff, which is probably less than 10% of all music in the world, and b) they all show full pages, not pages containing literally only three or four lines of music. Just because MuseScore spreads the staves out farther in the cases where there are literally only a few on the page doesn't mean it wouldn't fit more on the page if you actually added more.

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• Jan 22, 2021 - 15:59

The 3.5.2 one has the minimal system distance set to 4.5sp and the maximum to 8 sp.
The 3.6 one has the minimal system distance set to 8.5sp and the maximum to 15sp.

So with those current settings the score in 3.6 is asking to be vertically spaced out almost twice as much (8 vs 15). If you take over those settings from (especially the maximum system distance) then the score will look nearly identical vertically:
(3.5.2 and 3.6 side by side)
316041-side-by-side.png

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