Accidental too close to note

• Aug 26, 2013 - 22:00
Type
Functional
Severity
3
Status
closed
Project

1. Open attached score (produced in 1.3).

Result: The accidental is too close to the note - colliding with the ledger line.

Accidental too close to note.png

Using MuseScore 2.0 Nightly Build (025f37c) - Mac 10.7.5.


Comments

Severity

What should happen exactly? The distance between the note and the accidental is controlled by style -> general -> note -> accidental note distance. We can change this to 0.50 to avoid the clash but for notes without ledger line accidental will be far. We could measure the distance to the note including the notehead. Then what should happen if there is another note with a sharp lower on the stafff? should the sharps be aligned or not?

In MuseScore 1.3, the ledger line was shortened. Is it a good solution?

I don't suppose Gould weighs in on this?

Looking at a variety of samples from different major publishers, I don't think most of them seem to be following anyone one particular rule here. The look of MuseScore 2.0 is probably most common - accidental running into ledger line. Some publishers do this more or less all the time. A few publishers "sometimes" will move the accidental farther away, other times not - depends on whether they needed to save space on that system, I guess. In cases where they move the accidental farther away, sometimes they also adjust other accidentals in the same chord (ones far enough away that they can align vertically), other times they allow them to be slightly offset. The artificially shorted ledger line does not seem very common at all, but I see that from time to time.

Based on my examination, I'd say MuseScore is behaving the way most publishers do most of the time, but really, it's pretty clear there is no universal standard,

Elaine doesn't seem to say much about it. On page 78: "An accidental should be as close as possible to the note it precedes. Allow sufficient space to ensure that an accidental does not collide with a symbol that precedes it, or it will become illegible."