Text placement leads to stair steps

• Dec 3, 2018 - 21:33
Reported version
3.0
Priority
P1 - High
Type
Functional
Frequency
Once
Severity
S3 - Major
Reproducibility
Always
Status
duplicate
Regression
No
Workaround
Yes
Project

If you enter three (or more) tempo marks so they overlap, they form a stair step pattern like

tempo stairs.PNG

it would be better if this

tempo looks good.PNG

were the default behavior. In this picture I have only disabled Auto placement on the third tempo mark, but this is what it should look like any way.

Note: in a large score this is rare, but does happen. What is more commonly seen is in a part with a couple of sections between tempo changes having nothing but multi-measure rests and several tempo marks end in this stair step pattern.

I wrongly emphasized this issue with tempo text. It happens with other text types also, I first noticed it with tempo text.


Comments

Priority P1 - High

Absolutely. I recall discussion of this and I thought there had been work done on it, but I'm not sure what the status of that is.

FWIW, I've been studying the autoplace score lately, and unfortuntely I don't see an easy solution here. It's probably possible to add special cases here and there, but overall, this happens for the same reason that text won't fit under a volta even if you set the style default for volta to be high enough to allow it. The "skyline" is really that - a tracing of the top contour - and doesn't allow for things to be sneaked under things even if there is room. That would be an interesting algorithm too though, and no doubt quite useful.

Thinking about way this could be addressed without fundamentally changing the algorithm, something more clever than always adding elements to the skyline left to right would help. Maybe skipping unusually long text elements and adding them at the end. I don't know, I still feel I heard about work being done to improve this at some point, but I can't find evidence of it.