minimum bar width
Minimum bar width seems not to work as its name suggests. When I set mbw to 4 I get the 'right' picture; each bar is a square of height 4 sp and width 4 sp. When I go to mbw=2 I expect to see the bar as a rectangle of width 2sp but instead it is still the square. This suggests that internally the value of mbr is NOT allowed to go below 4. There is something that's not explained here.
Comments
At the other end mbw works as required at value 40 but not at 44. So the effective range of mbw seems to be [4,40] . Yet the software allows you to enter mbw down to 2 and up to 99. Surely this is not right.
There are other parameters (like the minimum spacing to the first note or from the first note to the barline) that can also affect this, and also the line will be stretched to fill the width of the page so that might mask the minimum width. If you continue to have trouble understanding how these affect your particular score, please attach it so we can check it out.
In reply to There are other parameters … by Marc Sabatella
Thank you Marc for putting me straight. I attach three scores which show what's going on. It's now clear to me that the symbols for half-note rest and half-note already come equipped with their own border which gives them a width of 4. This is why my setting of mbw to 2 does not take.
I wonder - is there anything I can put in a bar which is of width 2. If not, then perhaps the user can be prevented from setting mbw to less than 4?
In reply to Thank you Marc for putting… by Keith Paton
Maybe I didn't make myself clear - when I said there are other parameters at play, I meant, other parameters right there in that same dialog that you can customize also. The margin betwene barline & note and betwene note & barline are borh controlled there, as are other possibly relevant settings depending on what your actual goal is here. It's not clear at all why you are messing with this, probably you have some end result in mind but it might be there is a much more direct way to achieve the result.
Anyhow, set both of those margins to 0 and you get what I think you are describing here, even if it's not clear yet why you'd want this.
In reply to Maybe I didn't make myself… by Marc Sabatella
I should have set my question in context. A wise teacher told me "you don't understand a subject until you can describe it in writing for someone else"; that's what I'm doing for score layout. I was interested in how the length S in sides of paper depends on the number of notes N, the spacing sp and the minimum bar width. I conclude from our discussion that I should leave the mbw out. It seems to have a small effect and I don't understand it well enough.
In reply to I should have set my… by Keith Paton
There won’t be any such formula, it would be far more complex than that. Spacing depends not just on number of notes but also their durations (a half note requires more space than an eighth but not as much as four eighths, etc), as well as the presence of accidentals, the width of the key signatures, and tons of other variables.
In reply to I should have set my… by Keith Paton
There is a logarithm in the code that determines note placement within a bar so there is no constant that could be given to tell you that a whole note gives you a y width that can be divided into 1/2 notes, 1/4 notes and so forth. This means that as a minimum 8 8th notes is not necessarily 8 times wider than a whole note. I haven't examined all of the code and done the math so I couldn't tell you if this is more or less. MBW is simply the least distance you will ever see in a measure that consists only of a bar rest. You may never see a bar of this width if the width of a system is not divisible by this number.
In reply to There is a logarithm in the… by mike320
Marc, this suggests that if I were prepared to do a lot of tedious counting, counting separately for all those kinds of object like accidentals, 1/8 notes, 1/4 notes, I could form a weighted sum of these counts, the weights being widths. However I suspect that I'd need to take account of where these different objects occur, so this weighted sum idea does not work. None the less it seems to follow from what you say that Muse Score must maintain at least a variable called 'total width of all symbols that have been seen in the current system'. Though this would not reflect the appearance of the score unless it could cunningly take account of the different voice parts; each voice part must have its own running total width as suggested above.
In reply to Marc, this suggests that if… by Keith Paton
There isn't exactly a "total width of all symbols that have been seen in the current system", but what there is a "minimum width" for each measure. That's not the style setting - it's the actual computed minimum width based on the content of that measure. It takes multiple voices into account, also multiple staves. There isn't a separate total per voice/staff, just one per measure across all voices/staves. if you build your own debug version of MuseScore from source, you can turn off the horizontal stretch via the Debug menu - yield ragged right margins but all measures at their minimum widths.
Not that that any of this is really that practical., If you want to know how long a piece will be, just load it. You'll never get any closer than an extremely rough approximation trying to calculate it yourself.