Centering a musical example
I have created a musical example on one staff. I created a staff text box with the caption, and I moved the text below the staff and it is in the right place for a caption. However, the staff is left justified and I would like to have the staff centered. I assume the text box will stay connected to the staff and I will have to move it again, but it would be great if I could center both the text box and the caption.
Alternatively I wonder if I could create the caption using the title box and move the title below the staff and make the font smaller. Then I would have to center the staff and the text box.
Thank you for any information.
I
Comments
You could probably accomplish that best by setting extremely wide margins (layout->page settings). Another possibility might be to use a horizontal frame (create->measures->insert horizontal frame) to the left of the example to push it over, but you'd have to kind of eyeball it.
In reply to You could probably accomplish by Marc Sabatella
If I save the staff only and don't use the staff text containing the caption, I wonder whether I can save it as the .png file and include it in Word such that it is cropped, so that I can place the caption immediately underneath in Word and then center both the picture and the caption in Word if you can't center it in Musescore. When I save a musical example as a .png, how closely is it cropped and do I have any other control over that?
Another alternative is to print out the musical examples and scan them back in and crop them in the scanning software, but I would prefer to avoid the extra steps.
In reply to Centering in Word by peacenow
It looks like you posted your question about Word several times. Here is a link to a thread where I answered your question:
http://musescore.org/en/node/9032
It is also possible to center it in MuseScore as suggested by Marc Sabatella above. For details see frame in the handbook.
In reply to It looks like you posted your by David Bolton
>It looks like you posted your question about Word several times.
This statement is not correct. I posted different questions concerning the issue of creating a picture and including it in a Word document.
>a link to a thread where I answered your question:
>http://musescore.org/en/node/9032
I appreciate your sending some information, but that did not answer my question. It was a much too general response to provide exact steps that are known to work.
>It is also possible to center it in MuseScore as suggested by Marc Sabatella above. For details see frame in the handbook.
Again, I appreciate the provision of information, but placing a frame does not truly center the image, so this does not provide the level of information I am looking for.
In reply to Different questions about Word by peacenow
You can adjust the size of the frame as desired so that the music is centered. See the "Edit frame" section of Frame in the handbook for instructions.
In reply to Different questions about Word by peacenow
As mentioned, the frame can allow you to center the image, but you'll have to eyeball it. That's why I said the best way to do it would be to set margins appropriately. Or, simply set a page size just big enough for your example.
But FWIW, it's applications like this - incorporating short musical examples into a text document - like this that I find the most frustrating with *all* WYSIWYG editors, MuseScore as well as Finale, and also Sibelius from what I've been able to tell. I personally am finding more it more gratifying to generate these kinds of examples from a text-based music notation language like ABC or Lilypond. But this does require a certain level of comfort working with computer languages in general (eg, programming languages). So I think most people would probably be best served using a WYSIWYG by setting a page size just big enough for the example and then generating all examples (or all examples of that size, anyhow) from that same document.
In reply to As mentioned, the frame can by Marc Sabatella
The method I arrived at and described in the Word thread eliminates the need for any eyeballing or sany resizing by hand. It will produce staves of exactly the same size for all musical examples and will allow all of the centered images to be aligned vertically on the page. This will achieve a professional quality result.
On the subject of Lilypond and computer languages: I am aware that many musicians are not programmers. Personally I am a highly experienced programmer, but more on the mathematical side than on the systems side. I have typeset documents with troff and its equation editor and I also did a project in LaTex. A couple of years ago I downloaded Lilypond and found it to be unusuable because there were too many bugs. They seemed to be overextending themselves with too many features rather than stabilizing what they had. So far I have had a pleasant experience with Musescore and have not found bugs. At present Musescore seems completely usable for the project of typesetting the musical examples for a large publication. The other issue with Lilypond is that it produced .ps files, which are very nice to print from a Unix system, but when everything else you have at home is in Windows, it is a lot easier to get everything into .jpg form. So far I think the developers of Musescore did a wonderful job.
In reply to Centering without eyeballing by peacenow
The one step in your method that still requires eyeballing and could generate slight inconsistencies is the cropping; that's what I was hoping to avoid by setting page size directly in MuseScore. We're probably talking just a few pixels difference from example to example if you're careful, but I tend to obess about such things.
As I see it, though, the main issue with any WYSIWYG-based approach is not so much in the initial generation of examples - although all the switching between applications *is* kind of distracting and slows down my workflow - but in the maintenance of the documents. If you decide you later need to edit an example, the process of finding it again, doing the edit, and repeating the steps to get the edited example back into the document is, in my experience, kind of frustrating. Probably not if you're dealing with just a few examples, but I deal with dozens of documents that have hundreds if not thousands of small examples between them. So I'm always on the lookout for ways to keep the documents self-contained with the "source" for the examples embedded within the documents themselves, it makes my life easier.
Right now, that's only an option for those of us comfortable with a text-based workflow - and your mention of troff and Latex is right up that alley. I found some OpenOffice.org macros to allow you to embed Lilypond code within a document and have it rendered as notation, and allowed you to easily edit the examples by returning to the original source view. But while Lilypond itself seems pretty stable these days, the macros were not. Plus I found Lilypond itself not very pleasant to write. Then I discovered ABC and found it to be a much friendlier language, and abcm2ps actually produces better looking looking output than Lilypond in many cases. So I rolled my own macros that allow me to embed ABC code within a document and have it rendered as notation, and also allow me to return to source view to edit the examples. I'm much happier doing this than I was ever was generating examples from external programs.
It occurs to me, though, one could have the best of both worlds if one were to create a plugin for MuseScore that created a PNG and an XML file together, and macros for Word that read in a PNG and used the XML as the "alternate text" for the image. Then you could easily launch MuseScore on an example within a document by using the XML alternate text.
As usual, I'm rambling, but I thought some might be interested.
In reply to The one step in your method by Marc Sabatella
OOLilypond is the name of the OpenOffice.org macros you are refering too. There is a MuseScore version also, it does the cropping for you etc... Unfortunatly I can't link to it right now since it's hosted on sourceforge.net. I didn't test it recently but it used to work. It should be easy to adapt to use with LibreOffice. I will link to it here as soon as Sourceforge is online.
In reply to OOLilypond is the name of the by [DELETED] 5
Thanks for the info! I tried searching for it and found a couple broken links, not all to SourceForge. No useful info anywhere I could actually get to. I sure hope they get SourceForge straightened out soon!
Do you remember what the basic use model is? Is it using some sort of fancy object embedding (I vaugely remember Microsoft having something called OLE at one time), or is it working more in the rather cruder but lighter-weight I suggested (embedding ordinary images but then launching MuseScore on the source?)
I actually have an ulterior motive for wanting a scheme that involves MusicXML as an annotation on ordinary image files - this type of scheme could be easily extended to make documents that mix text and music to be accessible to blind users. Not by having them read MusXML directly, but by converting the MusixXML to something more human-readable like ABC, or into Braille Music. Having a blind student in one of my classes is actually what got me interested in ABC in the first place, and my macros grew out of that. But I realize that few of my fellow faculty will be up to doing things that way. If there's a working scheme using some sort of fancier embedded objects, and I was able to get something running to make the results accessible to blind students, I'd have a much easier time getting other faculty members to start producing written materials this way.
In reply to I tried searching for it and by Marc Sabatella
Two different topics here and we should maybe more to another post.
Sourceforge is not back online but OOMuseScore to OOLilypond and use images. It relies on image magick to do automatic cropping. So only images no OLE involved, but the image is linked with a file as far as I remember.
Regarding Braille Music, you could check out FreeDots and musicxml to braille conversion http://musicxml2braille.appspot.com/