Score reformatting on edit

• Dec 4, 2012 - 19:38

I suspect most of us who have used MuseScore for any length of time have seen cases where as soon as you make an edit somewhere, the whole score is re-laid out, changing where line breaks occur, etc - even *before* the point of the edit. I've assumed this was probably because of a round-off error somewhere in calculating line lengths, and some line just happened to be right on the edge of either fitting an extra measure or not. I can often make it go away by globally changing stretch. It's usually not bothersome, because by the time I get around to printing the piece, I usually lock in all my line breaks anyhow.

But for parts generated from a longish score, I often don't bother locking in my line breaks, and I am often running into this problem. What I do is get the parts looking good but without locking in all line breaks, save the parts, then run the Batch Export plugin to convert them all to PDF. Unfortunately, I find the line breaks in the PDF's often bear no resemblance to those I saw when I saved the parts. This often causes problems, as some of my manual positioning may have been based on the old line breaks. When I load the score to tweak things further, I initially see the same layout as in the PDF, but as soon as try editing anything, the entire layout shifts back to what I remember from my last save.

If I generate a PDF *after* editing the part (which causes a re-layout), the PDF reflects the new layout. But if I save the file then generate a PDF via the plugin, it goes back to the layout that showed on initial load. This limits the usefulness of the batch export plugin, as I really can't trust that the results I get will match what I saw when I last saved the file.

Anyhow, I'm not mentioning this to report a bug - I have no idea if this affects 2.0 (my parts look different when loaded in 2.0 anyhow), and I recall bug reports of this nature already being filed. I'm just wondering if anyone has any insight into workarounds for 1.2.

I'm considering trying to write a plugin to lock in all current breaks - I am thinking I can detect them by checking the pos() property of each measure and seeing where the Y coordinate changes. After locking in the line breaks, I would then plan to reduce stretch globally to make sure no lines are right on the edge. Then I could reasonably hope to find all line breaks in the same place on the next load, and hence in PDF's generated via plugin.

Any other thoughts on this?

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