Dynamics text style should be italic

• Oct 7, 2016 - 21:10
Reported version
2.2
Type
Functional
Severity
S4 - Minor
Status
closed
Project

See the full discussion here


Comments

Status (old) closed needs info

Would the compatibility issue be minimal enough to make this change for 2.1 as well? I'm wondering because https://musescore.com/shoogle/scores/3434266 makes reference to using text styles instead of applying formatting such as italics, and in measure 19 shows an example of adding text to a dynamic "correctly" that actually can only be done with manual formatting currently, and it would be nice if when OpenScore kicks off that example can actually be true.

If necessary I can work around this by changing the text style in the template scores which I send out to transcribers, but it would be nice if this could make it into 2.1.

That is because the other templates leave these at the defaults, and styles left at the defaults are not actually recorded in the template file? The jazz templates are indeed probably the only ones that alter the defaults. Maybe some choral ones place the dynamics above staff?

FWIW, though, I'm not convinced the jazz templates *should* use italics. People don't generally use italics in handwritten charts, and the whole point of using MuseJazz for dynamics is to get a handwritten look. I guess I'd want to see some specific examples of what we are talking about here - the linekd discussion covered a lot of ground. For 2.1, we are talking about possibly changing the dynamic text style to be italic and no other changes, right? We aren't talking about new "expression" styles or changing "technique" or doing anything else at this point?

In that case, I'm inclined to say you should leave the jazz templates alone - MuseJazz in italics does not look particularly natural, and as I said, people don't really use italics in handwritten charts. That said, I acknowledge we do use it elsewhere, so it's no big deal if we use it by default here too for consistency with other templates.

So with these changes here https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/pull/3049/files

Files created with MuseScore 2.1 with dynamics will have dynamic in italic. If they are opened in MuseScore 2.0.X, they will have dynamics NON italic.
If a score made in 2.0.3 has default, non italic, dynamic text style, it will be displayed in italic in MuseScore 2.1!

Is it really what we want?

(PS: I know we can implement the same hack done by Marc for instrument text, but this is ugly...)

In theory someone might be using that text style for something other than dynamics just because it happens to be the right size, position, and font for some other purpose, and they might not be as happy with the change. But I wouldn't let that possibility stop this from going through. And as I said, it's probably just as well to leave the jazz templates alone.