'Invisible' jump markings and jump instructions

• Aug 27, 2022 - 09:12

Some posts have asked why certain repeats with D.C., D.S. etc. are executed even though none of these instructions appear to be present. This is because someone didn't delete the statement itself, just the letters.
Finding and deleting these 'phantoms' is very cumbersome, since nothing is displayed in the score or can be selected directly.
As far as I know, the only way to find these places is with the Alt arrow key, deleting only after switching to edit mode with Alt-Shift-E and entering a dummy letter or text.
Wouldn't a delete button in the inspector be a first step? Or a small mark that remains in place and is still selectable? Or should the instruction also be automatically deleted when the letters are deleted?


Comments

You don't need to first enter text into them. If you've Alt-arrowed onto them, they are selected (see status bar) and you can just press "delete" on your keyboard to remove them.

Having them there is a bug (the question is whether they're truly empty though). If you by normals means edit the text of a marking and remove it all, then the marking is automatically deleted as well. So the fact that these markings can still be created indicate a bug.
I'd rather have the bug being fixed than a feature to show things that shouldn't exist being coded around it.

In reply to by jeetee

> "You don't need to first enter text into them. If you've Alt-arrowed onto them, they are selected (see status bar) and you can just press "delete" on your keyboard to remove them."

Yes, you're right. I tried this in the problem file from here https://musescore.org/en/node/334654 but as there are a lot of phantoms in that measure, I then believed that 'delete' wasn't enough after all. :-)

> "I'd rather have the bug being fixed than a feature to show things that shouldn't exist being coded around it."
Isn't the bug the user who deletes not the instruction but only the text letters? Hence my recommendation: if the string is empty, this should be equivalent to deleting the statement.

In reply to by HildeK

> "Hence my recommendation: if the string is empty, this should be equivalent to deleting the statement."
That should already be the case in 3.6.2; try it out. Add a D.S. al Coda (for example), double click it into edit mode and backspace/delete the text in it, then click outside of it; it'll not be there at all.

In reply to by HildeK

Either the score was originally created in an older version that had the bug, or, there is some highly unusual special sequence of steps that continues to trigger the bug, but no one has yet managed to find how to reproduce it. Seems to be extremely rare either way though - I think we get maybe two or three reports a year, tops. Definitely, more worthwhile to figure out if the bug does truly exist than to spend time developing more workarounds for it.

Meanwhile, here's a tricky way of finding empty markings of a given type:

1) add one marking of that type normally
2) right-click / select / all similar elements
3) use Inspector to set the Frame to rectangle or circle

Now any texts of that type - including empty ones - will have a nice frame around them. For extra fun, set the highlight color to red and make sure to set the alpha channel / opacity to something other than 0 (255 is opaque).

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