Allow Staff Properties to affect multiple staves at once

• Feb 9, 2017 - 16:15
Reported version
2.1
Type
Functional
Severity
S5 - Suggestion
Status
active
Project
MuseScore

If you right-click on an instrument name of and Instrument with multiple staves like piano or organ, and select staff properties, then the changes made in that dialog (like setting staff to small) affect the top staff only (and the instrument Name too, in the canse of Setting staff to small) but not the bottom staff or staves, i.e. it just behaves as if the right-click had been done on the top staff.

Comments

• Feb 9, 2017 - 18:52

IMHO not, the Instrument 'Piano' (or Organ) consists of 2 staves (or even 3). The Instrument Name belongs to them all.
If you do use the staff properties dialog on the bottom stave and change instrument, to e.g. Flute, the top staff is changed too

Reply

• Feb 9, 2017 - 19:23
Title changing staff properties of grand staff via right-click on instrument name only affect top staff ⇒ Allow Staff Properties to affect multiple staves at once

OK, I probably misrepresented things a little. What's really happening is, the instrument name belongs to the *part*, not either staff per se. The dialog itself tries to make that distinction clear - top half is for the staff, bottom half for the part, as per the labels.

Anyhow, the real point is, the staff properties dialog never affects more than one *staff* at a time. And when you think it, the current architecture doesn't allow for it - how would we handle cases where the values are already different (like is one staff was small but the other not)? We'd need to invent some method of representing this in the GUI and handling the conflict. Although FWIW, we don't actually solve that problem particular well in the Inspector, which doesn't give any visual cue that elements in the selection might have different values. Other programs do something like display one value but it in italics to indicate it doesn't apply to all elements. But at least the Inspector does contain code to deal with this - it just doesn't communicate what is going on as well as it could. Staff Properties simply doens't have any concept of dealing with multiple staves at once.

So anyhow, it's certainly something we could consider, but it's more a new feature than a bug.

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