Increased Bracket Functionality

• Apr 25, 2016 - 05:42
Reported version
2.1
Type
Functional
Severity
S5 - Suggestion
Status
active
Project

I'll be brief: in the piece I'm working on, I have 4 staves. I want a curly bracket on the top two, and a curly bracket on the bottom two. I also want a bracket joining both together. Of course, when there are only two staves in the score on other parts, I want the joining bracket to go away. Currently this is impossible- brackets are an all-or-nothing affair that cannot be made invisible no matter how inventive the method is that you try.


Comments

My proposal is that nested brackets automatically detect when they are not needed and don't display in those cases. That is, if an inner and outet bracket have the same start & end span after hide empty staves, one of the brackets should not display. Not sure which; still need to understand more about the use cases. Maybe we need to add some sort of property to the bracket itself to specify this, but that's problematic as brackets are not normally persistent (they are created on demand).

In your example, which staves would typically end up being empty, and which bracket would you want *not* to appear in that case? Can you post an actual score to demonstrate?

For my example, it would be that the first two staves are populated for 2/3 of the score, with an additional 2 added on for the last third. The full score example that I have is attached.

Attachment Size
PreludeCSharp.mscz 55.12 KB

So it's the outer bracket that should be suppressed in this case. Seems like a reasonable thing to expect to happen automatically; I doubt there is a case where one would really want both sets of brackets...