Fingerings input mode
#278175: Easy fingering input mode has a PR for a finger editing/input mode. It seems to be a good idea.
There are some things I don't understand about fingerings. Someone in another thread asked about piano fingerings. I told him there were several issues opened, and I was told these were mostly related to Guitar fingerings. From looking at the fingerings palette, I don't see a difference between Piano and Guitar fingerings on a standard staff.
In piano music you will sometimes see
to show a switch from one finger to another while holding the note.
My first question is if this is standard notation or if there is a more common notation.
My second question is related to the fingering input mode (which I see is actually a generic text input mode - a great idea). Can a shortcut be assigned to the ligature that will allow the change fingers symbol to be included in fingerings?
Including this shortcut would help to standardize how this symbol is entered into MuseScore and ultimately how it is exported to musicxml for blind users.
My final question is whether the PR is bad or waiting to be merged.
Comments
"From looking at the fingerings palette, I don't see a difference between Piano and Guitar fingerings on a standard staff."
About this point, it's a current issue, in waiting to be fix/improve, filed here: #280807: Regression - 3.0 doesn’t distinguish between fingerings and LH guitar fingerings.
The switch is indeed a standard notation.
M understands is that piano fingerings and guitar RH fingerings should be similar - displays above the stem/beam, stacked for a chord - while guitar LH should be left of the noteheads. In 2.3.2 we weren't smart enough to stack chord fingerings for piano or for guitar RH above the stem, so we settled for putting them left of the noteheads as well, which is wrong but the best we could do. For 3.0 I think we can do better and am hoping to get some consensus on the ideal layout and then see how close i can come.
Regarding shortcut for the ligature symbol - no way to do that from within MuseScore that I can think of, but standard system shortcut techniques would presumably work (eg, Alt + 0 + the Unicode point for the symbol works on some keyboards, or you could set something up with AutoHotkey, etc. Meanwhile, it's found on the F2 special charcaters palette, so it's perfectly possible to enter.
To me the PR is good :-). But I acknowledge that an improvement would be to add Space & Shift+Space as synonyms for Alt+Right/Left for fingerings specifically (not for other text, obviously, because embedded spaces are far too common). I made an effort to get that to work but it turned out to be more complex. To me that doesn't diminish the usefulness of the feature as it - it's just an opportunity for further improvement later.
In reply to The switch is indeed a… by Marc Sabatella
All of this is very useful information. I look forward to the fingerings being stablized in version 3. I don't play piano or plucked instrument, but I'm working on a project to make it easier for scores to be transferred to braille. Once the fingering input mode is merged, I can work on a standard input method that will work with Braille converters and export to musicxml.
Thinking out loud, I just tested F2 with a fingering and the only symbol shaped right. It doesn't look right unless you put spaces around it, but blind people probably don't want the spaces. I'll have to ask.
In reply to All of this is very useful… by mike320
I'm not entirely sure, but my thinking is you aren't supposed to need spaces, and simply entering the symbol (very last one on the palette under the default "Common Symbols" tab) between the numbers with no extra spaces should do the right thing by default. I think it's supposed to overlap the numbers horizontally. It's just not supposed to collide with them vertically. That is, the issue to me is that the symbol is not positioned high enough in the FreeSerif font. FreeSans is marginally better. Checking a bunch of other fonts (changing it for the text element itself Inspector), I see a whole lot of other variations on how it might look, but on my Windows 10 system, almost none do what I personally expect. The only ones that do are "Segoe UI" and something called "Yu Gothic". So probably I'm wrong about my expectations.
If you switch to the "Musical Symbols" tab, and select the "Fingering" section, you'll find a similar symbol labeled "Finger substitution above". This one only displays "above" if you also use the finger numbers from that same dialog, but it doesn't overlap. It's not a bad font though for the fingerings themselves (it comes from BravuraText I guess). Which actually leads me to what may be the best solution: use those fingering numbers but use the substitution symbol from the FreeSerif (eg, using the "Common Symbols"). Unfortunately, no way to make those the default fingering symbols to be used when typing fingerings since they aren't normal numbers - you'd need to add them to a custom palette.
In reply to I'm not entirely sure, but… by Marc Sabatella
For the blind people, the font wont matter. For those who see who are entering the score, they will want to make it look acceptable. I'll have to talk to my blind contacts and see if the space is ok or if the transcribers will have to suck it up.