MuseScore 3.0 - automatic layout problems

• Jul 19, 2017 - 14:42

I checked out MuseScoreNightly-2017-07-19-1318-master-b0b536d just to see how automatic layout was working.

I loaded up an old orchestral score and used Ctrl+A, Ctrl+R to reset the layout for everything. I then generated all parts ("New All"). I'm seeing a bunch of problems. Rather than invest a ton of time documenting what may all be known problems, I'll quickly mention the obvious things and post a screen shot.

  • I'm getting some really weird slurs (see image). I suspect that resetting the layout might not be resetting some control points on the slurs.
  • Multiple-measure rest numbers are colliding with a lot of stuff.
  • I'm getting system text collisions (some of these are worse in the parts, where multi-measure rests can pull text closer together).
  • Text is continuing past the edge of the page. This is text that is fine in the master score. When a part is created, the measure with the text can occur near the right edge of the page. The only time this might be acceptable is if someone enters text longer than the width of the system.
  • Measure numbers are appearing inside the stave rather than above it.
  • System text is getting transferred only to the top-most part.
  • I had some notes that were beamed across the staff that are all on one staff now.
  • I'm seeing hairpin/slur collisions.
  • My notes are showing up blue. At first, I thought this was to indicate they were all voice 1, Now I think it's a left-over from when I did Ctrl+A.
  • Dynamics and hairpins aren't always lined up.
  • When a measure contains only one voice, could you remove any rests left over from when the measure had two or more voices?

You're headed in the right direction!

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Comments

Thanks for the feedback! This is a good list of things for us to investigate further. I'm sure that as we do so we'll have questions and might followup to ask for more specifics, but actually, I for one have a pretty good idea of what you mean by most of them.

FWIW, even to the extent some of these might be known areas for further work, just seeing which are the things people notice right off the bat as needing work can help prioritize.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Forgot to mention trills (with wavy lines) colliding with slurs.

In case it's useful, I'm including a screen shot of the same part in Sibelius (below).

Sibelius has a problem in that there are cases where slurs should go through accidentals, but Sibelius always chooses to go around them. A quick test in the nightly is that MuseScore is also totally avoiding the accidental, making for overly curvy slurs. (I'm not an expert on engraving, but someone who seemed knowledgeable complained about Sibelius's behavior and claimed that cross the accidental was the correct approach).

Another thing that would be nice for parts (and that Sibelius lacks) is to make the default staff size per instrument (defaults set to typical standards, but with the ability for the user to override and save the overrides to match a house style).

Speaking of house styles, in Sibelius rules for automatic layout can be modified by the user. While the system they use is not perhaps the clearest, it's nice for the experts to be able to tune the layout. It's useful to be able to save these settings and share them.

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