Vertical positioning of lyrics is affected by changes to other staves.

• Sep 25, 2021 - 19:33

I consider this a minor GUI problem which occurs randomly, yet frequently.

Steps to reproduce:
1) Create a score withy a vocal accompanied by several instruments. (I have not experimented to determine how many instruments are necessary to see the effect.)
2) Populate the score, starting with the vocal staff, including the lyrics.
3) Observe the position of the lyrics as the instrumental lines are populated or make changes to an instrument part. I observed the problem in the attached score while adding dynamics to the brass and the conductors parts at measures 63 through 67.

I consider this minor bug since I have not had a problem when I create the individual parts and the positon of the lyrics in the score is not as important. However, I only do minimal editing to the parts, mostly small formatting adjustments, so I cannot be sure the problem could not happen with only a vocal line.

Attachment Size
Yesterday.mscz 68.92 KB

Comments

I've loaded your score but there is much going on and it's not obvious where the perceived problem is. Can you give precise steps to reproduce the issue?

My guess is you are seeing the fact that continuous view, for efficiency reasons, doesn't normally relayout the entire score on each change, and can therefore sometimes not "notice" changes that could possibly result in the need for more or less space between systems. The next edit that does force a full relayout will fix that, or just toggling continuous view off then back on.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

In step 3, I gave an explicit example. Try removing those dynamics and restoring them (I believe that the uploaded file was saved immediately after I added those dynamics). I've found any number of changes which have affected the placement of the lyrics.

I just tried that tests after opening my current version of that score. I was not able to cause the problem with simple changes. This may mean that the problem is much more difficult to reproduce.

I have occasionally had bugs like this - where the obvious problem does not occur unless some other operation enables the bug. They are not pleasant to troubleshoot. I shall watch and try to determine what the "enabler" is for this problem. This may take a while because I don't arrange many vocals.

One option would be for me to get set up as a developer so that, when I next see the problem, I can try isolating it.

Again, thank you.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

I tried various things today that were similar to what had caused the problem over the weekend, but I was not able to cause that today. Unfortunately, I had not paid much attention to the lyrics after I had entered them, so I would not have noticed when the problem started and, until I tried to recreate the problem today, I had thought that the problem started immediately, rather than after some currently unknown operation.

Since I seem to be the first person to have reported this, maybe I should have guessed that recreating the problem was not so simple. I shall do what I can, when I can, to gather more information on this problem.

One note relevant to your "continuous view" part of the reply - I have not made recent changes to the vocal line, so I'm not sure why the lyrics should sometimes move up to where they overlap a middle C (first measure of the local) or move down far enough to leave room for another line of lyrics about them. Note the less, I believe that the lyrics were not correctly positioned both when I last saved and when I saved for the upload. Now, from my last save, they appear to be correctly positioned. This may be related in some way to "continuous view", but more data certainly needs to be collected before you put more time into this.

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