Reduce stretch in already-narrow measures not very effective
Reported version
3.2
Priority
P2 - Medium
Type
Functional
Frequency
Once
Severity
S4 - Minor
Reproducibility
Always
Status
active
Regression
No
Workaround
Yes
Project
Use the attached sample score, taken from the final system of a Brahms song transcription.
1. Note that the final measure is far too wide.
2. Open Measure Properties to reduce the stretch.
Expected result: negative stretch should be enabled (as it was in MuseScore 2.3.2)
Actual result: negative stretch is disabled for the final measure.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| Impossible to reduce stretch for final measure.mscz | 10.27 KB |
Comments
Negative stretch has never been supported, but that's not the problem. The problem is the large offset applied to the chord. Reset the offset and the measure looks normal, and you don't actually need any stretch. If the goal was to center the dotted half (not really recommended, despite what another edition apparently chose to do), probably a better way would be with leading space adjustments. One for the chord segment, one for the barline, and you can get something pretty close. You might also want to reduce the minimum measure width in Format / Style / Measure.
That said, it would be nice if it were possible to make individual measures even narrower in an easy manner.
Marc, in a way you are right - but only partly right. I accept that the chord offset is a problem (which I hadn't noticed).
We can agree to differ about this:
"If the goal was to center the dotted half (not really recommended, despite what another edition apparently chose to do)"
Well, "another edition" was only Breitkopf & Härtel - if not the oldest music publisher in the world, a highly respected publisher in Europe. ;-)
But consider the following:
a) in MuseScore 2 the default Layout Stretch is 1.0, and it is possible to reduce it down to zero (i.e. shrink the stretch, but not to a negative value) - even in the final measure
b) in MuseScore 3 the default Layout Stretch is still 1.0 - except for the final measure which changes the default value to 0.0 (which you cannot reduce at all)
I still consider that a bug and a nasty regression too.
Yes, it was not so uncommon for olders publisher to occasionally align notes in that way, but the modern standard is otherwise. So really, there should be no good reason to not just leave this at the default / correct modern layout.
But if for the sake of argument you choose to, the method I described works better.
I don't understand what you mean about the stretch being changed to 0. It's 1.0 by default even for the last measure. You may have explicitly reduced it to 0, but MuseScore doesn't do that automatically. So I'm not quite understanding the regression. I guess the minimum stretch measure width is a little bigger than before?
Marc, my apologies all round. I didn't input this score, but was reviewing it afterwards. So I made assumptions based on what I saw, rather than testing in more detail.
First mistake: I completely failed to spot the change in X-offset to the chord in the final measure. I assumed that this offset was a layout "improvement" handled by MuseScore 3... Second mistake: I assumed that the zero Layout Stretch in the final measure was a new default in MS 3 - not that the Layout Stretch had been altered by the transcriber.
Sloppy work on my part, for which I am sorry. I am marking this issue as "Closed", because there is nothing to fix.
Well, it is still the case that it would be nice if reducing stretch in this measure were more effective - even without the change to the offset of the chord, it never does get as narrow as it potentially could. So to me that does suggest an opportunity for improvement in the calculations, so I don't mind leaving it open for that. Still, it's possible to get that measure as small as you might care to by increasing stretch on the other measures.