Automatic placement in 3.3.7

• Sep 25, 2019 - 04:02

Hello,
I do not understand how automatic placement works. When I noticed that it places an element (a vertical line) wrongly, I disabled this function for the element in the Inspector and saved the file. However, after reopening the file, I found the element placed wrongly again with automatic placement back on.
So is there a way to disable automatic placement for an element permanently?
Or maybe is there a way to disable automatic placement globally and permanently for a particular section or file?
Best regards,
Maslav


Comments

First, there is no 3.3.7, the current version is 3.2.3, although there is a beta of 3.3 (no 7). But I'll assume you are using some 3.x release.

It shouldn't be necessary to disable automatic placement just to move an element manually - if you don't liek the default position, just move it, either with the mouse, or the keyboard, or the Inspector. But if you do for whatever reason choose to disable it, it should indeed stay disabled, and normally it does. I can easily believe there might be some unusual corner case where this doesn't work for whatever reason, though. In order to investigate, we'd need you to attach your score and give steps to reproduce the problem.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Dear Marc,
It seems I misdiagnosed the problem and I believe now that the problem is not with autoplacement but with my non-standard use of lines in text elements.
1) there seems to be no symbol for showing the scope of e.g. guitar barre - my solution to this is to use two pieces of text - short dashes ending with a vertical line, likes this: - - - - - - - - |
2) the problem is that after I join the line of dashes to the vertical element and save the score, after reopening the lines are slighly moved out of place - no matter if autoplacement is on or off
I attach a score fragment.
Regards,
Mateusz Luczak
P.S. Sorry for giving the wrong number of the MuseScore version. I meant 3.2.3

Attachment Size
Lines.mscz 6.49 KB

In reply to by Maslav

FWIW, though, it does seems a bug that the vertical line in your example moved when saved when automatic placement was left on (for me it worked fine in your example with it off). I think what happened was a slight miscalculation in the exact position of things, so that sometimes that line was just barely overlapping the last dash and sometimes was not, which threw off the calculation of whether automatic placement needed to move it above the dashes or not. I think this is actually a side effect of that fingering - there is a known issue where the width of a measure shift slightly after load in certain cases when fingerings are present. See #289946: Layout shift after load in score with fingering.

Anyhow, the problem only came up here because you were relying on moving a piece of text a long ways and trying to manually make it line up with something else. This is always going to be problematic, as any change in the layout algorithms or fonts that alters the width of the measure would have caused those to not align the way you wanted. So definitely better to use the line.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Your explanation makes sense - it seems that the problem resulted for the most part from my makeshift solution - the two lines had to be aligned and sometimes there had to be a micro-overlap, and if automatic placement adjusts the length of a measure - automatically, of course - this could have affected the mutual position of my lines. Fortunately, now I know how to use the special barre symbol instead.
M.

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