A better vertical frame

• Jan 18, 2012 - 07:37

Vertical frames are useful but counterintuitive, and offer less control than one would expect. I often want to add a bit of space between a pair of staves (I seem to be doing a lot of exercises where virtually every staff ends with a double bar.) I add extra space between groups of related material. Adding a vertical frame lets me add a HUGE space, which I can then tweak down to a FAIRLY LARGE space, but fine adjustments are not really practical -- I'm thinking of the things we do routinely with word processors, Adobe Illustrator/InDesign,etc. It seems logical to expect fine control over how much spacing (leading) is inserted between page elements.

Also, I'm sure plenty of comments have been made about the strange requirement to insert a horizontal frame within a vertical frame to enable creation of a text block. Again, intuitively we'd expect to be able to plop blocks of whitespace or text at any point on the page, either with or without interrupting the flow of staves and systems, and without introducing surprising concepts. Sorry if this issue has all been thrashed out for 2.0.


Comments

You can increase the distance between staves by using the spacer (from the breaks and spacer palette) rather than a vertical frame.
Even if using a vertical frame, you can tweak its size to whatever you need, even a negative size is possible (and I have used that myself at times)
And as to creating text in a vertical frame: I usually 'misuse' the texter/composer fileds for this (for right- resp. left aligned text)

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

Thanks much for the comments.

> increase the distance between staves by using the spacer
Ah. I had misunderstood that feature.

> vertical frame...can tweak...to whatever you need, even a negative size
Yes, I've been doing that, although it is always a bit of a fiddle.

> text in a vertical frame...I usually 'misuse' the texter/composer fields for this
Do you mean adding a title/subtitle/etc. to the frame? Or something else. Sorry if I'm being obtuse. Again, my point is that we should be able to add generic text to any frame, not just the few named styles that appear in the context menu.

1. Cut/paste vertical frames
2. Insert vertical frame before another vertical frame (not just before a measure)
3. More formatting controls specific to a particular vertical frame (override vertical frame style settings)
4. Add frame text to vertical frame (as discussed above), not just title/subtitle/composer/poet
5. Auto-resize of vertical frame to match contained text
6. Image handling tools within vertical frame
7. Create mini-score within vertical frame with its own staves, systems, etc. (Egad)

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