Malfunctioning shortcut on italian qwerty keyboard + how do I force more bars in a line

• Feb 19, 2022 - 13:13

Hello,
I have a score with custom instruments whose full name is longer than average, and I'm trying to fit 4 bars in the first line of the page.
I've tried reducing the font size of the instrument name.
I've tried reducing the page side margin.
I've tried adding a break after the fourth measure, resulting in it being alone on its own line now.
I've tried reducing layout stretch, but the brace symbol doesn't exist on my keyboard, so I have to constantly open the drop-down menu, go into the submenu, click on decrease layout stretch, and hope something happens.
I tried changing the shortcut from brace to square bracket, which on my keyboard is under alt gr + è for opening and alt gr + "+" for closing. However, in the "add shortcut" popup UI, alt gr + è is read by Musescore as ctrl + alt + [, and similarly for the closing bracket. Trying to then use the shortcut, be it as alt gr + è, OR ctrl + alt + è, OR ctrl + alt + alt gr + è, doesn't have any effect even through many repeated presses. Same for the closing bracket version of all of these.
Any tips for either forcing the bars in line or fixing this compatibility issue?


Comments

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

Not meaning to sound rude, but the premise was that I tried that. It's extremely slow, and it doesn't show whether the stretch value is at 0 already, or whether the lack of effect is only due to the change in the value being too small to produce an effect in that situation ( it has happened to me several times already that, say, 3 clicks on "reduce stretch" do nothing but a fourth one achieves the desired outcome, and it's very cumbersome to have to do 20 times Format > Stretch > Reduce Stretch just to be sure)

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

No idea, I don't program. Probably through ASCII keyboard shortcuts, copypasting, or language-specific distributions of the programming text editors (or plugins for them) that are made in such a way as to map the curly braces to other symbols that are present in the keyboard but unused in programming?

I should also add that I've tried selecting the 4 measures I wanted to fit together, and going into right click > bar properties > layout stretch, but opening the bar properties menu window causes the selection of several bars to be lost in favour of the last selected one, which means it's impossible to change the layout stretch of several bars at once through that menu.
On the other hand, the drop down menu from the upper general menu bar allows one to change the stretch of several bars at once (without losing the selection), but only by a set, hidden amount per click - it doesn't allow selecting a specific value from the get go, and it doesn't show whether a lack of displayed change is due to the value having reached 0 already, or if it's just a local minimum in the visible results, which can be pushed through by further lowering the stretch value (which has already happened to me in similar situations)

The shortcut reduces the spacing by one "notch" (a value of 0.1 in the spacing algorithm). The default value is given in Format / Style / Measure - the Spacing setting. It is normally 1.2, so really, more than 2 presses of "{" (or whatever shortcut you have customized) won't have any additional effect - 1 is the minimum value. If that doesn't allow your music to fit, you simply need smaller music, so keep playing with your font and scaling settings. Well, you can also experiment with reducing the "minimum note distance" setting, but I don't recommend that - it will make things run too close together and be harder to read than simply reducing the scaling a little.

if you continue to have trouble, please attach your score so we can understand and assist better.

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

The minimum for spacing is 1. But the minimum for stretch is 0. Stretch is applied starting at whatever the spacing value is. So if the spacing value is larger - say, 2.0 - then small stretch stretch values will have an effect. Basically, the minimum value for "spacing * stretch" is 1.0 (although I think the calculation might be more complex than that). And it isn't measured in sp, it's just a multiplier that is factored into the width calculation.

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

I never understood how those settings worked until I started trying to tweak the algorithms a few years ago, and even then it was quite a while before I really got it. And now, it's changing (for the better!) in MuseScore 4, as the default spacing won't be a simple multiplier on the minimum space for the measure, but a formula designed to do a better job of ensuring consistent spacing of similar note values from measure to measure within a system.

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