Style control of accidental interlock threshold

• Jun 24, 2021 - 17:18
Reported version
3.6
Type
Functional
Severity
S5 - Suggestion
Reproducibility
Always
Status
active
Regression
No
Workaround
Yes
Project

Under Style > Accidentals, it would be nice to have a numeric control for adjusting the threshold MS uses for interlocking accidentals on harmonic intervals. For example, the Leland font allows two sharps a 6th apart to interlock, whereas all the other music fonts stagger these sharps. Staggered sharps are preferable for loosely spaced layouts, interlocked for tightly spaced layouts. A style control would be a simple way to make the accidentals by default either "tight" or "loose" and a numeric control would allow tweaking this for various fonts since they can all potentially behave differently. See also https://musescore.org/en/comment/1084379

In general, more such controls for threshold layout spacings would be welcome, for example spacing around dots and flags, as these often result in odd spacings (usually way too much space) which must be tweaked by hand to look correct.


Comments

For things like dots, best to submit that separately. And both here and there, best to also include some sample scores demonstrating the perceived issues with the defaults. Not saying we couldn't someday add more controls, but if we can eliminate the need for more controls by using more "correct" defaults, so much the better. Note most of these things are quite subjective, and certainly the default for spacing around dots already is controllable, so examples would also help illustrate the specific corner cases you mean that for whatever reason aren't already covered.. Again, though, best in a separate thread, since it's not related to accidental interlocking.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

I expected to be told to submit things separately, but if I were to do that, there would be perhaps 5 to 10 submitted items which would all be very similar, so it made more sense to me to simply mention the general problem here. The problems are not what I would call corner cases, they are rather normal cases. I'll start taking screenshots and post them here. To get started, here's a simple example of a dotted half rest (Leland) where MS pushes the dot about 2 spaces too far to the right for no reason:

Attachment Size
too widely spaced dotted half rest.png 13.68 KB

The reason it's so important to have separate issues for separate problems that would require separate fixes is so we can keep track of which have been fixed and which have not. Also, some might be higher priority than others, and we want to be able to track that. Nothing at all wrong with 5 or 10 separate issues.

The example you show here is entirely unrelated to accidentals, so please do submit it separately. The "corner case" I am referring to is the fact that this particular half rest is sitting on a ledger line - most don't. So that's the specific case that could use adjustment. No need for separate settings, the default should just be better in that specific case.

Thank you, Marc. I understand and will submit issues separately instead of posting more things here. I'm often not sure if one issue isn't related to another, but I'll do my best to separate, give clear examples, and leave the rest to your expertise.

What I will say is that if it's a request to introduce a new setting as opposed to simply fixing a case where the default is just wrong (whether a corner case or not), you could certainly collect related requests together. For instance, settings relating to accidental layout could be mentioned in one issue, as they'd likely be implemented together by the some person at the same time. But any proposed new settings for dots should be discussed separately. So far, I don't see the need for any need settings for dots - just a fix for the specific case of a dotted half rest on a ledger line, where we are apparently trying to account for the ledger line width but doing a very bad job of it

Title Style control of accidental interlock threshold, element spacing thresholds Style control of accidental interlock threshold
Workaround No Yes