More professional scorewriting features
Currently musescore allows for excellent music notation. However as far as I'm aware it isn't that great for creating "finished product" professional sheet music so far as the word processing side of things. The music notation features seem to be well developed so far, maybe it's a good time to start focusing on developing features that allow for more professionally finished sheet music. Features that would be good to develop could include a structure that allows for multiple sheet music documents, and support for the ossia (yes I am aware of work arounds). For example currently the best way to compile music scores is to create individual scores. This can make it difficult to maintain consistency across all of them. It would be good to be able to create a musescore document that allows you to have a cover sheet, page of contents and then individual cores. You would then get formatting consistency across each piece of music. I know you can create a template, however the only problem is that If you make changes to the layout you have to go back to all the scores that you create and apply the change to each one. You should also be able to tweak each score/page if needed. What I'm thinking of is more word processing style features. For example with Word you can easily create a title/cover sheet, table of contents etc. You can also have header/footers and even section breaks (allowing for a new formatting section in the document). It would be good to be able to insert images onto the score title cover of the score allowing for more intricate designs including a publisher logo. For example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Schumann_-_Kinderszenen,_Op15_-_Score…
Another useful feature would be to include a watermark. For an example of sheet music that includes a cover sheet, multiple pieces, and a publisher logo watermark see this link here:
http://conquest.imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/a/a2/IMSLP67290-PMLP0279…
Comments
Currently the best work around that I can come up with is to create each individual score and then save it as an svg file and insert it into a word processing document for editing.
In reply to Currently the best work by jono_7
Most of the features you mentioned are not scorewriting features but publishing ones. DTP Software are specialized and professional software for this publishing purpose (Word is not btw...). Adding professional DTP features in MuseScore would make it more powerful but probably also heavier, and harder to operate, especially for the majority of us, the non publishers.
There are a few things that you can already do though. For example, you can add an image in a MuseScore file. But if you want to create an intricate design, a watermark etc... it's probably a good job for a DTP software and not MuseScore. And so your workaround is the way to go. SVG or PDF export and import in a professional DTP software.
One of your feature request is probably more in the scope of MuseScore: The ability to maintain consistency among several score file. This is the purpose of "Styles" in MuseScore. A user should be able to import and export styles to replicate the score appearance on several files. It works only partly in MuseScore 1.3, especially regarding text styles. Hopefully MuseScore 2.0 will make this process more easy and robust. If you are interested, you can test a development version. See [[nodetitle:Download]]
Ossia is a topic by itself. See #6544: Ossia