Cutaway staves - better handling of clefs, barlines and brackets (suggestion)

• Jan 11, 2019 - 20:02
Reported version
3.0
Priority
P1 - High
Type
Functional
Frequency
Few
Severity
S5 - Suggestion
Reproducibility
Always
Status
closed
Regression
No
Workaround
No
Project
Tags

Musescore 3.0's new cutaway staves feature is a step forward for users like me who create replica scores containing ossias.

However, there are some improvements which could be made, namely :-

  • Enabling clefs to be visible (or of course invisible) at the beginning of a cutaway staff. This is currently only done if the cutaway's first measure is also the first measure of the system.
  • Enabling brackets to be indented (again, optionally) where the cutaway's first measure is not the system's first measure.
  • Enabling the left hand barline of the cutaway's first measure to be visible (and invisible) if it is not the system's first measure.

See the attached score for an example.

Attachment Size
Cutaway_staves_feature_request.mscz 94.55 KB

Comments

I agree, and I'd like to add a way to force a measure to show up on a cutaway staff. (Or better rules on when a measure shows or not).
In this page from Penderecki's Stabat Mater, you can see there are two empty measures in the line of the BASS.
In this case MuseScore would hide these two measures but that won't be good. In many cases there is a single rest measure in the middle of a divisi, ossia or score that should not be cut away.
page from stabat mater penderecki.jpg
Also, I'd like to draw attention to how clefs are shown: before the measure that is not hidden, on a portion of staff.
Since MuseScore doesn't draw just a portion of a measure staff, maybe the whole measure which has the clef should be shown?
Currently, if I add a clef to a measure, it is added right before the barline on the previous measure -where it belongs- but it's hidden along with the measure. The only workaround I found for now is to add a Staff Text to that measure so it's forced to show up. (Invisible text won't work)

Regarding the control over whether an empty measures displays - you can hack this right now by adding an invisible note. Ultimately, I want to see us add an explicit "not empty" element that could also force an otherwise empty staff to display with "hide empty staves".

Working on barlines and clefs (see PR below).

For brackets, IMO, a bigger overhaul might be needed. I'd suggest to improve the Bracket inspector and to add a Staff Name inspector, to be able to:
- Indent manually the bracket with Offset
- Add a bracket group-name (similar to musicxml implementation)
- manual offset / set visibility to staff names

And in a second stage let MuseScore auto-indent brackets and staff names for cutaway scores.

Status active PR created

https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/pull/6409

Created PR that allows adding and editing Begin Bar Lines to measures, and also sets measures visible when they contain a clef (see image).

PR - improve cutaway.png

~~Displaying partial measure staff lines only for the courtesy clef (like in cutaway examples from literature) is not currently possible. The workaround is to cover the unwanted portion of the measure with a white image.~~ EDIT: just changed this. See update below.

Attachment Size
PR - improve cutaway.png 33 KB

So, the experimental PR is there and it allows adding a manual barline to the beginning of a measure and to make the clef visible if it's before the barline of a visible measure.
Now I am thinking on a more complete approach so this works as expected out of the box. The idea is to set special conditions for measures:
1) If a measure is empty, and the next measure is empty, just hide all the measure
2) If a measure is empty but the next one is not, show only the measure EndBarLine
3) if a measure is empty, the next one is not, and there is a clef before the barline, show the EndBarline, a fraction of the Staff Lines and the clef

Reported version 3.0 3.5

So... as the previous solution wasn't satisfactory (too messy IMO) I reworked it and came up with a new PR that (hopefully) solves the missing bar lines problems without any manual intervention.
- Bar Lines at the end of invisible measures now show automatically when next measure is visible and in same system
- Clefs before barlines in invisible measures are now visible, drawn over a short staff "trailer". (Since there is not always a need for a clef, these must be added by the user.)

For the old "look", user can always make the barline invisible.

https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/pull/6461

Attachment Size
cutaway after.jpg 29.03 KB
Fix version
3.6.0