How to delete parentheses around notehead?

• Feb 19, 2021 - 16:55

I'm sure you're going to show me a simple way to do this that will make me feel stupid. Still, I have tried:
1. clicking on the parens themselves and clicking delete
2. clicking parens and opening inspector - I can make them non-visible, but can't remove it
3. clicking notehead and double clicking parens in pallete
4. clicking notehead and dragging parents from pallete on top of note
5. clicking notehead and then trying to change to a different notehead
6. probably a dozen other things

I can't get the parens to go away.

I'm sure I could delete the note and re-add it from scratch, but I shouldn't have to do that.

Your help is appreciated! Thanks!


Comments

  1. should work. It does not though, seems a bug.

Workaround: delete and re-enter the note

  1. would be an interesting feature, making it a toggle.
  1. does work actually, only that a double click adds them twice, so you need to remove them twice too

(Phew...)

And another double click adds another 2, so you need to delete all 4, etc. ...

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

First of all, thanks for the replies and giving this your attention!

"does work actually, only that a double click adds them twice, so you need to remove them twice too"

Not sure what you mean. Double click doesn't work, but neither does single click. Neither one does ANYTHING. Nothing is added "twice".

Here is a video demonstrating the issue:

https://youtu.be/092_P3rJbxc

Hope this helps. Thanks again!

OS: macOS 10.16, Arch.: x86_64, MuseScore version (64-bit): 3.6.2.548020600, revision: 3224f34

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

Okay guys, now I get it.

And I started with a fresh note to confirm this is true. Bizarre, but true (lol). And the only way I know to delete the parens is to select each actual half-paren and hit the delete key repeatedly. (Or delete the entire note to which the parens are attached).

Looking forward to the fix ;-)

Meanwhile, why can I select and delete half parens? Is there a use case for parens not appearing in pairs?

In reply to by reggoboy

Not sure what fix you might be awaiting, everything is working as it should as far as I can tell?

Another way of deleting just the parens might be to select the measure, then right-click one parent, Select / All Similar Elements in Range Selection, the Delete. Another is click the first paren, shift+click the last, which also selects all parens in that range, then Delete.

As for why something might add just one paren, tons of reasons:

1) because the paren is part of a numbered list, like this one :-)
2) because smiley :-)
3) etc

The point being, not all parents are used for the specific purpose you are using them for in this particular example. That's why they are independent symbols. They also need to be positionable separately,. so you can control the amount of space between them.

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

Whoa, no. The whole point is that people don't KNOW they're adding multiple brackets, or "garbage". We are trying to remove them; to toggle them off. I'm sure you realize we weren't trying to add 50 pairs of parens, right? We're not idiots. The the failure is in the UI. It's one thing to silently create a meaningless pile of parens, but then to leave them in a pickle cleaning them up is a double mess. So that's what needs to be fixed.

In reply to by reggoboy

I don't know, to me clicking twice adding something twice shouldn't be that surprising. Which is to say, it's not a bug, but it is something we could possibly provide a hack for so double-clicking doesn't add them twice even though logically it certainly should. I don't think anyone is proposed making further changes so that adding 17 parens would not actually add 17 parens. Just special-casing double-click somehow to only add them once.

Meanwhile, whether that particular hack is ever implemented or not, this shouldn't change what you need to do: single click, don't double-click, nor seventeen-click, when adding symbols. So the change won't actually affect your workflow that I can see, it might just prevent the occasional confusion from people who don't know that single click is sufficient.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Double click used to be needed to add pallet items. Then it changed to single click. Many users including me are still double clicking in the heat of the moment and are adding duplicate items that are not visually detectable. Duplicate items can and do cause problems, like duplicate voltas screwing up repeats or parentheses that are seemingly undeletable, but which are difficult to diagnose. Just telling users not to double click seems a bit of a cop out. There are plenty of operations in Musescore and other applications that require a double click. A user is almost guaranteed to double click in error sometime when a single click is required. In most cases the error is immediately obvious as the user can see that something other than what they expected has happened. In the case of adding pallet items in Musescore that immediate feedback is missing. The result looks the same whether the user single or double clicks, but actually a booby trap has been added to the score that becomes apparent only later. Either doubly added items should reveal themselves using collision avoidance or the "feature" that every click adds another item of the same type so that it is hidden on top of a previously added item should be removed.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

"I don't know, to me clicking twice adding something twice shouldn't be that surprising. Which is to say, it's not a bug, but it is something we could possibly provide a hack for so double-clicking doesn't add them twice even though logically it certainly should. "

What if you took some boldface text and then clicked "B" again on your toolbar and that made it boldface "twice". Looked the same, but you had to undo it twice to make it go back to plain text. That's pretty much what we're dealing with here. It's a design flaw plain and simple; that's not up for debate. Whether you fix it is up to you guys.

In reply to by reggoboy

There is no such thing as boldface twice. A better analogy would be, what if you there was a button you could click to add a carriage return, and you double-clicked it. I'd expect two, yes.

EDIT: for a real-world example, try double-clicking the Undo button in Google Docs.

So, no, I wouldn't agree it's a "flaw", but I do agree it's worth adding a special-case hack workaround to prevent people from making that particular mistake. Which is why that issue exists, and will hopefully be addressed at some point. But again, no need to wait for it, just don't make the mistake to begin with. That's my point - fi you do things correctly, it works correctly already.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

No, undo or enter are NOT better analogies at all.

For 3 reasons:

-one can desire to add 2 enters or to undo twice. But never to add 2 identical voltas
-2 enters or 2 undoes have an immediate visual effect, adding 2 identical voltas not
-2 enters or 2 undoes won't corupt the score in any way, 2 voltas break the repeat behaviour

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

“There is not such thing as boldface twice”.

That’s exactly the point, Marc! And there is no such thing as two sets of parens around a notehead!

And that’s exactly why allowing either one would be a design flaw.

“If you do things correctly, it works correctly”

I really can’t believe we’re having to have this conversation. Of course that’s true. No one is disputing that. But one of the jobs of a UI is to protect the data from getting into a state that doesn’t make sense.

Please review the “boldface twice” analogy.

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

"Still the bold analogy is bad, bold changes an existing element, brackets and lines add elements, entirely different thing."

Perhaps an example that matches the implementation details more closely might be the augmentation dot. Stacking multiple augmentation dots makes no sense whatsoever (not to be confused with double or triple augmentation). As such, the GUI disallows it. And so the toggle you are proposing for parens will likely make them behave like the dots, as they should. ✅

Thanks in advance! (And yes, meanwhile, we will obviously take care to avoid it!)

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

“Still not a good analogy. Augmentation dots are implemented as toolbar buttons and come with a shortcut command.”

I think the disconnect here is that you’re confusing implementation details with UI/UX design.

In all three examples I presented — notehead brackets, boldface text, and augmentation dot — the user wants to click it on and click it off, and certainly never wants to have multiple instances stacked on top of one another. That’s it. Simple.

Whether something is implemented as a separate element or is on a palette vs a toolbar does not affect that critical user expectation. It certainly affects how the developers have to solve it, but that is not the topic here.

“And actually the short for dot might better add dots (cycle though 1 to 4, then 0) rather than toggle”

Interesting thought, if on a different topic. I would just caution that the more dots you augment with the more content to the right that you overwrite, and therefore won’t get back when you cycle back to “0”.

In reply to by reggoboy

Even the Bold analogy is bad: you may want it bolder on 2nd press.
And you really can'
t looks at UI/UX design without thinking about the inter representation.

Whatever, as said numerous times: yes, this duplication is an issue (see above) and even one with a pending fix.
That fix won't make it a toggle though, no other palette element works as a toggle, so that would be breaking exising UX/UI expectations.

Until then: just don't do it, simple as that.

In reply to by reggoboy

We're having the conversation because it's an interesting technical discussion to me. But feel free to bow out if it doesn't interest you any longer.

Anyhow, yes there absolutely is such thing as two sets of parents. Could be used for any number of completely valid purposes. Also, we're looking at extending the parent command to also allow them to be added to other symbols, like lines, articulations, etc. They serve an important function to mark editorial changes, in addition to the specific purpose you might happen to have in mind here, so increased - not decreased - flexibility isextremely important.

So as I said, as an entirely separate issue, sure, the command to add the parens could be made into a toggle, like the dot. But to be clear, this would break consistency with the rest of the palette - nothing else works that way. Everything else, clicking it simply adds it. And there are certainly cases where one might actually want multiple parentheses. So it would be important to somehow still allow that.

So I'd personally favor making the keyboard command toggle but make the palette continue to work normally, except to add the hack to disable double-click specifically. And there is a pending PR to do just that. Then we'd enhance the parens to allows them to be added to any symbol, and yes, preserve the feature that allows multiple sets to be added and to be treated independently. Just because that feature might not be useful to you doesn't mean it doesn't have value.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

"As for why something might add just one paren, tons of reasons:

1) because the paren is part of a numbered list, like this one :-)
2) because smiley :-)
3) etc

The point being, not all parents are used for the specific purpose you are using them for in this particular example. That's why they are independent symbols."

Umm, yea, sure. But we're not talking about Text fields. We're talking about the Notehead, right? I'm asking why someone would want a notehead with a paren on one side but not the other.

Now, if you need them to be separately deletable so that they can be separately movable, due to a software limitation, I get it.

In reply to by reggoboy

Whether it's text, or a symbol attached to a notehead, or a symbol attached to something else like a barline or whatever else, is immaterial. The point is, parentheses are designed as separate symbols - a left and right. This is how it is in every font every, and it's part of both the Unicode and SMuFL standards. And it's for good reason - lots of good reasons, in fact. So don't think of it as a "software limitation" that ( and ) are separate characters - it's a fundamental fact of how fonts work, really back to the first days of moveable type.

That said, I could certainly imaging e someday making the command used to add these into a toggle. The special command (shortcut "(") for adding parentheses already adds both symbols at once, no reason that special command could not also delete them at once. But they would necessarily still remain separate symbols, movable and deletable independently when using the normal delete command.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

To be extra clear, when mark say "every click added another", he means when you double click you are adding two sets of parentheses, one from each individual press of the mouse button.

Most items added in this way including voltas and dynamics, as well as parentheses are overlaid exactly on top of each other so that there appears to be only one present. See the link I posted above for examples of other problems this behaviour causes.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

To be extra clear, when Mark says "every click added another", he means when you double click you are adding two sets of parentheses, one from each individual press of the mouse button.

Most items added in this way including voltas and dynamics, as well as parentheses are overlaid exactly on top of each other so that there appears to be only one present. See the link I posted above for examples of other problems this behaviour causes.

I have seen this same behavior in earlier versions with other elements: Hairpins, lines, dynamics. I erroneously double clicked and got two superimposed elements. The reason I never mentioned that on a forum post is
1. I am the kind of person who hits the delete key a second time if it does not work the first time. From there it is easy figure out what is going on.
2. The double clicking was my fault.

In reply to by azumbrunn

But when did you find out there was a doubly added element?

My reason for nagging about this is that users can't immediately see they have added two items by mistake. However some time later the seemingly unrelated effects become apparent; they find that, for example repeats don't work as expected. Making a diagnostic link between repeats not working and having mistakenly double clicked earlier, possibly days earlier, is difficult. There is no indication that two identical voltas are sitting on top of each other and, as the double click is a somewhat automatic action, the user will not recollect whether the single or double clicked. And so we have puzzled users complaining about repeats not working when the underlying cause is bad UI design that has allowed them to make a virtually undetectable error. Agreed, it is their error, but the UI has facilitated it and has made it difficult to identify so that it can be rectified.

The proposed fix seems a Good Thing, and I look forward to seeing it implemented.

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