Can no longer disable "size changes with spatium" in text styles
Reading around the forums I can see that this option was removed deliberately as part of the wider effort to make text styles simpler. However, I think removing this particular option was a step too far.
I use the "text size changes with spatium" feature (or rather the ability to turn it off) to get the titles and copyright text on the cover pages of OpenScore editions to be the same size in each edition regardless of the stave size in the score. Of course I can still achieve that effect by manually adjusting font sizes until the text looks the same size in each score, but that is an awful lot of work to achieve something that used to be done automatically.
To make matters worse, even if I did go through all the scores and set the size of each item of text manually to make them look the same, if the score is edited later and the spatium changes (e.g. to ensure page breaks stay in the same places) then all of the text sizes would have to be manually redone. If they were not redone then linebreaks would be in the wrong places.
There are many other uses for this feature besides cover pages, such as adding libretti and stage directions to operas, adding a foreword or dedication, or adding any other piece of text that goes with the music rather than being part of the music. The removal of the "size changes with spatium" feature renders all of these use-cases infeasible.
In fact, I can tell that the other developers agree that this is a useful feature - because it is still there for certain text styles (e.g. Title, Composer and Lyricist). These styles do not scale with the stave size even though all the other styles do.
It's true that removing the "text size changes with spatium" feature has made the UI simpler (one checkbox simpler) but it has not made the internal implementation any simpler since the code to prevent text from scaling clearly still exists. In fact, it has made the internal implementation more complicated since now certain text styles have been special-cased whereas all text styles were treated equally before.
I would very much like to see this highly useful feature restored, especially given that it still exists internally.
If you want to make the UI simpler, here are two alternative ways to do it:
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Only show the "text size changes with spatium" option in the advanced workspace (hide it in the basic workspace).
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Change the wording of the option to "font size in spatium units". If it was enabled then sizes would be set like "10 sp", which would obviously scale with the music. If it was disabled then the size would become "10 pt", and this obviously would not scale with the music.
Comments
I would agree it's useful, and certainly I'd love to see OpenScore editions look as good with as possible in 3.0. So I do agree we should add this back.
I can take a look at re-implementing this, the Pid still exists for it.
Something for Werner to express opinion on, though.
https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/pull/4352
By the time I saw your comment, I'd done most of the work. I can close the PR if Werner is against it, but as I explain in the PR, I don't think that it was removed on purpose.
Thanks for the PR! I don't think it was removed "on purpose" so much as somebody just got a bit carried away when removing the other things as part of the general shake-up of text styles. I wasn't a fan of some of the other changes made, but I can see there are benefits and I can live with the drawbacks. In this case I felt it necessary to make it clear that this is something that is absolutely essential and that there is no sensible workaround.
If I understand the issue correctly, it is not about how this option is not available from the Inspector. It is about how it has disappeared from Format > Styles > Text styles. It got moved to the "Lyrics" page under "Lyrics Melisma" with commit 1bf0154, presumably by mistake, since that meant it got separated from its reset button. This is something that I have corrected in https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/pull/4093.
Actually, I think both PRs should be merged. If I understand this correctly, it's useful to have this on an element by element basis, not as a blanket setting for one text style or another. So, while it should be fixed in the Format>Styles>Text menu, it should also be included in the inspector for text.
I agree it should be present in both the Inspector and in Format > Style > Text Styles. One of the aims of the new style system was to expose all formatting options in the Inspector rather than having them tucked away in dialogs and context menus.
Fixed in branch master, commit 86824b54b2
fix #279572: can't disable 'size changes with spatium' from inspector
Fixed in branch master, commit cd2931f997
Merge pull request #4352 from jthistle/279572-size-change-with-spatium
fix #279572: can't disable 'size changes with spatium' from inspector
Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.
The option is back but doesn't quite work as intended. See #280523: Switch size changes with staff space settings does not affect styles individually . It is particularly important for the custom styles since those might be used inside or outside of a text frame, but should ideally be fixed for the other styles too.