Musescore Formatting question

• Aug 20, 2018 - 23:49

If I have only 2 measures in a line and then break, the two measures are stretched to the maximum width.
There are several reasons I dont want that.
e.g. If I do analysis, I want to be able to have measures at the exact length as how it appears in the sheet music even if it is only one measure.

So how do I e.g. if I have only one measure per line, do I shrink the measure arbitrarily.
The default stretch to page width is ugly after a break after first measure.
The ->layout increase decrease stretch does not work unless the measures to be stretched/shrunk is large than a line in length.

Comments

• Aug 21, 2018 - 03:11

Frames are not an obvious way to force line breaks. They have the advantage that you can easily adjust the size of the measure on the line with them. If you want one measure that takes up the entire line then use a system break from the breaks and spacers palette (with not frame). You can even put the system break on the frame if an annoying measure shows up after the frame.

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• Aug 21, 2018 - 18:49

Just something to note:

In "normal" published music, all systems (except perhaps the last) are stretched the full width of the page, even if there is only one measure on the system. It only looks ugly if there is only one measure on a system but more measure could have fit. Sometimes editors will deliberately juggle where the line breaks happen just to avoid that situation - they will almost never violatew the normal rule about having all systems but the last stretched.

That's "normal" music. You mention "analysis", which suggests that maybe you aren't talking about "normal" music but maybe an excerpted reprinted in a textbook or something? In that case, then indeed, examples will not be stretched. And there are a number of ways of creating this type of layout in MuseScore. Frames are one of them, but another is to simply create the examples as individual score files, so each system is the last, which will then defeat the stretching (unless the "last system fill threshold" is exceeded as per Style / General / Page). These can then be combined using with analysis the image capture tool and a word processor, for example.

Anyhow, bottom line, it's always best to attach the score you are having trouble with so we can advise better - whether the best thing to do is use frames, or the separate scores technique, or the technique I mentioned that editors often employ to simply avoid this situation, or perhaps some other solution best suited to your particular use case.

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