Should be able to delete elements with "system" flag (tempo markings etc.) when selected as part of a range
Reported version
3.6
Type
Functional
Frequency
Once
Severity
S5 - Suggestion
Reproducibility
Always
Status
active
Regression
No
Workaround
Yes
Project
- On a new single staff score, add a tempo marking
- Select the whole measure
- Hit backspace/del (or use Edit|Delete command)
- Nothing happens
In fact as long as your selection is a range, elements with the "system" flag (meaning, extract to all parts) do not seem to get deleted at all.
There might be some circumstances this makes sense but I can't say I can think of any offhand (and you should be able to deselect using the selection filter - currently tempo markings come under "other text" that includes Staff Text. So perhaps an enhancement to the selection filter seems called for here too).
Comments
Undo does though remove the tempo (or system-) text
This is by design and absolutely makes sense a lot of the time, I'd say the majority of the time. Once the basic structure of a piece is in place, it can be quite common to play with its content - cutting and pasting the specific notes. One doesn't normally want the tempo markings and voltas for a piece to disappear just because you decide a flute line would be better off moved to the oboe, etc.
That said, along with the idea of someday adding a facility to copy system elements with a range, indeed it would be great if the Selection Filter were be redesigned in a way to make either a possibility.
In reply to This is by design and… by Marc Sabatella
I'd agree that in a multi instrument piece if you select only a measure in the top staff the default behaviour probably shouldn't be to select the tempo marking too. But if you select a range covering all instruments/parts then I'd very much expect tempo and other such directions that apply to all parts to be selected, and once it's clearly shown as selected, delete/cut/copy/paste should surely apply to it. Which is my issue - that the tempo marking is showing as selected but delete does nothing, which I don't believe would ever be expected, and contradicts what happens if you just click on the tempo mark directly to select it.
Also why is delete a special case? All other commands (as far as I can see) still work on the tempo text if you select the whole measure, including changing visibility, changing autoplace etc. (change color doesn't seem to work, nothing happens at all).
I don't agree that I'd expect something different to happen just because I happen to select more than one staff, whether it's two staves or "all" of them. The inconsistency would not be good in itself, and anyhow, one might very often want to simply have a do-over on the notes for a passage but wish to keep the system markings.
But it's certainly true that if they are to be excluded from range selection, they should be truly excluded - not highlighted, not affected by other commands, etc. Of course, that leads to the point that the system marking maybe should not always be excluded - being able to include them in a copy/paste would be desired in many cases, as discussed elsewhere. So again, a well-designed scheme for controlling this behavior would be most welcome. Ideally, it would deal with all of these cases in a natural way.
In reply to I don't agree that I'd… by Marc Sabatella
I'm just proposing that score directions like tempo markings that apply to all parts should only get selected if you've actually selected all parts/staves. That seems logical enough, though it's hard to think of parallels in other software - they're a bit like page headers that are shown on every page, so you wouldn't expect them to be included if the selection was just one page, but you might if you selected the entire document (MS Word doesn't do this though, headers can't be selected along with the main document content at all as far as I can tell).
But an improvement on the current behaviour would just be to always exclude such markings from range selections, until the selection filter can be improved to allow including or excluding them (just please don't call them "System objects"!).