Invisible Verse 1 leaves room in score
The discussion started at https://musescore.org/en/node/310145 so rather than hijacking that thread totally I'm starting a new thread before opening an issue.
The question is weather this is a bug or a feature.
When you have multiple lyrics and make any but the last lyrics invisible, there remains room for these lyrics on the score. It makes sense that if any lyric on a system is still visible, the space for the lyric remains. If all of the lyrics for that verse are either made invisible or deleted, the remaining verses should move up.
The use for this is to simplify making bilingual songs with only one language being shown at a time. You can hide one language's lyrics, then select all lyrics press v and this becomes a toggle between the two languages.
So, bug or feature?
Comments
I consider this a feature and not a bug.
In your use case scenario, where your lyrics aren't actually verses at all, consider the following steps:
1. Select the currently visible language
2. Turn it invisible
3. Select the "verse" (=language) you wish to show
4. Use the inspector to set those lyrics to verse 1, the others should now swap verses (or move all the others down, I don't remember)
5. Make them visible
It seem that all you were missing is step 4?
In reply to I consider this a feature… by jeetee
Then again, I can't really think of good reasons to turn lyrics invisible in the first place.
I'd still only shift others up if all lyrics from a verse are hidden though (not just on the current system, but across the entire section)
In reply to Then again, I can't really… by jeetee
The reason I want to turn lyrics invisible is to show only one language at a time. If verse 1 is Italian and verse 2 is English then you can make all of verse 2 invisible to show the original (I'm working on an Italian opera). If I want to see the English, I can select all verses and press v to toggle between the two. The problem with both being visible at once is that the pagination is very tight, adding a verse will make me shrink the score even more to prevent systems from moving to the next page. Systems moving are unacceptable for my purposes. I've been involved in discussion with other about doing this so I know I'm not the only one who want this.
Using your method only moves the lyrics around and doesn't affect visibility. Ideally, the number of lyrics being filled under the notes will be identical, but this doesn't happen. When you move lyrics from one verse to another, only the notes with lyrics move which may leave words where you don't want them. BTW, changing the verse of one word trades it with the words in the new verse.
To me this is a bug. They don't eat spacer horizontally when made invisible, they should not vertically either, not between staff and visible lyrics at least.
They probably might/should/need to when between visible verses
In reply to To me this is a bug. They… by Jojo-Schmitz
I think you make a good point that I thought about but didn't mention. I can't give an example of why, but it's conceivable someone would want to make verse 2 of 3 invisible and keep the spacing so invisible verses between visible verses would continue to take up space. If the first visible verse is placed where verse 1 belongs, then there would be flexibility for the user to use verses as they like.
In my example, if I have 2 Italian verses I'd put them in 1 & 2 with English in 3&4 and only room for 2 verses would be used.
As to if it's a suggestion or bug, this still isn't totally obvious to me. I suppose making it a minor bug report due to its rarity of use with no work around would be the way to go. The only real workaround is to redo the score, and that's not much of a workaround.
To me it's neither bug nor feature, but just how it is. That is, I doubt the current behavior is actually useful to anyone (although you never know), but it was never designed to work otherwise, and due to how this is all implemented, changing the design to start trying to align syllables from different verses just because something happened to be invisible somewhere else would get pretty ugly, I think. That is, unlike the way autoplace works in general with a "skyline" that invisible objects can be simply excluded from, the lyric alignment works totally differently, and I doubt there is a straightforward way to design or implement a way around this.
Your use case of wanting to swap in different sets of lyrics for different language is a good one. Maybe it would be better to have more direct support for this, a way to simply disable a given verse entirely. That would probably be much simpler to implement, and more useful I would think.
In reply to To me it's neither bug nor… by Marc Sabatella
A direct method to switch between the two sets of lyrics was where my other discussion went as well. Perhaps that would be a better suggestion (feature request) than to have invisible verses be used as a workaround.