How to create short examples?

• Dec 29, 2012 - 13:13

I'm using musescore v 1.2, on Mac OS 10.7.4.
The project is a book about music, originally produced as a facsimile of hand-written, hand-drawn artwork. We're setting it up as a Word document, and I'm using musescore to score the examples.Typically they are a single bar, sometimes with just one voice, often with two staffs, treble and bass clefs. I'm using semibreves as the notes, I put in a time signature such as 12/1 or 16/1 and make the time signature invisible.
So far, so good. For some examples, the single bar extends to the full width of a page, and that's fine. But there are cases where the example consists of just three or four semibreves, and I want to be able to fix the width of the item to, say, two or three inches wide, so that we can either have one example centred on the page, or perhaps have two side-by-side. But musescore seems either to pack the bar into a very small space, or to stretch it to the full width of the page. How can I control the width of each item?

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• Dec 29, 2012 - 13:24

You can get rid of the time sig entirely by deleting the 1st measure (using "Ctrl-Del") (We're not sure yet whether this is a bug or a feature)
You could insert a horizontal frame before the 3rd (now 2nd) measure, add a line break to it and resize the frame, so the measure has the size you want

In version 2.0 (preview available as a nightly build) you have a foto mode.

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• Dec 29, 2012 - 15:23

As someone who does a lot of this, here are my observations:

- The easiest way to control the width of a line on an ad hoc basis is to append a horizontal frame then resize it manually until it takes up the rest of the space.

- If you're doing a lot of this with similar examples, you're better off creating a template with a narrower page size (or wider margins), and the Last System Fill Theshold set very low, which will automatically make each line fill the (narrow) page and hence come out the same length. Even without a template, you can also use page size and margin width as an alternate way of controlling line width after the fact - just make sure the fill threshold is set low enough (no reason I can think of not to just use 0%) that the music fills the line. You can get a neater look for your book if your examples are consistently just a few different widths - say, some exactly 1", some exactly 2", some 4", some the full width of the page.

- For a few one-off examples, lasconics's Snippet Creator plugin is great - it automates the process of creating a graphic and cropping out all the extra white space. The result is ready to insert in a Word document. I forget what resolution it uses by default, but you can edit the plugin file to override it.

- If you're doing more than just a page or so and can consider switching from Word to LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org, I highly recommend the MuseScore Example Manager extension I developed (the one lasconic mentions above). It automates the process of converting your example to a graphic and cropping it, as well as as the process of inserting it into your document, and it inserts the grapnics as a hyperlink to the original score making it easy to edit the example later. ctrl-click the example within your document and the corresponding score is automatically loaded into MuseScore, and then hit a button back on LibreOffice and the changes are automatically incorporated back into your document. Between switching to a new word processor and the installation of the extension and associated tools, it's not worth it for one-off's, but it saves enormous amounts of time and effort over the course of a whole book.

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