Opened file from Musescore 2 and can't seem to fix the formatting.

• Jan 18, 2021 - 04:12

First of all, i know that in general MS2 scores are not designed to play particularly well in MS3, for whatever reasons. However, there is a whole book that I wrote in musescore 2 and I decided I finally wanted to be able to use it in musescore 3 as well. So I opened the file and braced myself to have to do hours upon hours of fixing formatting. ( For what it's worth, every single update seems to mess something up in the formatting of my scores, it's pretty frustrating but I've gotten used to it. My scores are method books for young kids so they involve a lot of spacing manipulation for ease of reading, graphics, etc.) So like I said, I was ready to go at it. But the problems that arose in the formatting don't seem to follow any logic now and without doing some ridiculous manual move-arounds (which will then save and screw up the formatting again the next time I update) I cannot seem to fix them by any conventional means. For example, in my old score i had changed the colors of some of the treble clefs to a shade of grey. The new score seems to interpret them as non-existent and replaced them all with black treble clefs, then printing my grey treble clefs a little bit smaller next to them. Fine, I changed the color of the new ones and started going through the score line by line deleting the 2nd treble clef on each line. Usually the music written after it snaps back to be closer to the new treble clef (having been displaced by a second treble clef), but not always. I have tried to reset any x displacements of all notes and measure lines to zero. This doesn't fix it. I tried changing the distance to the right of clef/key signature in style. This had no affect on the score whatsoever. You can see another example in my #51, where the measure of G's inexplicably has a huge space at the beginning of it. Yeah, I can spend a few minutes changing that by drastically moving around the X placements of everything, but that will save enormous displacement values for those notes and measure lines just to get them to look, in fact, evenly spaced.
Like I said, i prepared myself to have to fix a lot but was not prepared for my score to turn into a Frankensteins monster of displacements and manual formatting, that, lest we forget, will surely all have to be undone for the next software update. I understand, it was a musescore 2 score. But it doesn't seem reasonable that this would make it impossible to use in musescore 3. I appreciate any guidance or suggestions you all might have. If I actually need to rewrite the entire book from scratch, please let me know before I waste more time trying to fix this. Thank you!

Attachment Size
Book 1.0 B Violin.mscz 269.5 KB

Comments

That's apparently the already converted 3.5.2 score.
Please share the 2.x score so we can have a look at where the formatting goes all wrong.

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

Yes, it is in the converted score that all the formatting went wrong, and in the converted score that I wish to fix it. This is essentially the 2.x score opened in 3.5.2. Are the formatting problems I mentioned not visible in it? They should be apparent. I will attach the 2.x score if that is helpful for comparisons. I have tried to be careful to do 'save as' and not save after opening in 3.5.2, so hopefully it has preserved the 2.x file format.

Attachment Size
Compilation Book2C.mscz 288.51 KB

In reply to by Stefni

Another good example would be #75, where what used to be two lines has been stretched into four. Try deleting the 'extra' treble clefs, then try shrinking the lines back to be 2 again - it doesn't work. So I go into style 'measure' and reduce the minimum note distance. Finally I have two lines, but in front of the last measure of each line there is now an extra treble clef and an extra key signature. I cannot delete them, at least, not the key signature. I understand what is happening at first and am willing to work through it, tedious though it will be, but I don't understand the fact that I can't do it. Why doesn't anything I do restore default placements? Why doesn't selecting and deleting the key signature remove the key signature when there is one already at the beginning of the line.

In reply to by Stefni

I think my best bet is probably just to try to manually adjust placement, even if the values don't entirely make sense to the appearance. Would anyone have any other ideas for how to fix these things or an idea of what might have gone awry with the spacing? Thank you!!

In reply to by Stefni

The extra clefs seems and key signatures to indicate some sort of problem with the original score that somehow 2.3.2 failed to detect. Not totally clear what, but I would recommend simply removing them all. Note sure which you are having deleting?

Anyhow, scores with a lot of complex formatting like this are indeed not great candidates for version changes, but still, I think once the errors like duplicate clefs are fixed, it should actually be pretty close. In particular, for #75, for me deleting the clefs does return it to two systems.

In reply to by Stefni

The problem with attaching the already-converted scores is that it is then too late to understand what is going on - we would need to see the file before conversion, opening it in 2.3.2 ourselves, comparing, etc.

So, working from your 2.3.2 version, can you describe one of the problems you perceive? I opened it in 2.3.2 and 3.6, using the "Keep old style" button in 3.6, and at a quick glance, everything looks pretty darned close on the first couple of pages at most. One or two places there the spacing / margins were slightly different, allowing 3.6 to fit a one extra text block on the first page for example. Nothing a page break doesn't fix.

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