Vertical offset control in Inspector direction is contrary to expected
The vertical offset control in any element's inspector has two direction buttons, up and down. When clicking on the up button, the element goes down and the other way around when clicking the down button. This is counterintuitive, especially given that the horizontal offset does work as expected.
I guess the problem arises because the vertical position is thought of screenwise (the vertical coordinate of a pixel on a screen increases towards the bottom of the screen). But most people will think coordinates as in a cartesian diagram (especially the musicians, for whom the pitch metaphor is strong).
While eventually one gets used to that, the cognitive disruption is so big that sometimes I find myself attempting to use the horizontal offset in the same ackward way as the vertical one!
Comments
An increasing posiive value of Vertical Offset causes the element to move down the page. Clicking on the up arrow increases the Vertical Offset value. The behaviour of the arrow is not, therefore, wrong and I think it is probably a bit late now to alter the way that the Vertical Offset is referenced. When you think of the music being entered from the top, left of the page and progressing across to the right and downwards it seems more logical to reference from an origin in the upper, left.
In reply to An increasing posiive value… by underquark
I understand the programming reason, but from the user point of view it is completelñy counterintuitive. When you need to move an object around, the up arrow is expected to move the object upward and the down arrow is expected to move it downward. It behaves that way with the keyboard arrows in those elements that respond to the arrow keys.
In reply to I understand the programming… by fmiyara
Indeed. Hopefully for 3.0 we can redesign the control to provide an option to work directly as well as numerically, as per some of the previous discussions on the topic. Or else bite the bullet and change the interpretation of the numbers within MuseScore.
This has been discussed recently and explained too.