Changing actual measure duration should give the choice to keep first or last beats

• Feb 23, 2016 - 11:47
Type
Functional
Severity
S5 - Suggestion
Status
active
Project

When I have to make bar 0 shorter (to remove rests before the first note) and I resize it through bar properties menu always the last part is deleted, with notes, and the beginning rests remains (see attachments). It is logical to resize _the bar 0_ in the beginning direction, when necessary.

Attachment Size
test_3.mscz 3.95 KB
test_4.mscz 3.8 KB

Comments

And yet, at other times, it does make sense to delete the ending notes. Depends on whether you happened to have just enough foresight to enter the leading rests, but not quite enough to have specified the duration of the measure first. Admittedly, that's a reasonably common combination, but so are others. I'm not crazy about the idea of special casing the first measure of a score in this fashion, but I do see that it ends up catching people by surprise sometimes. The solution right now of course is to first select the portion of the measure you want to keep, copy, then paste back after the duration adjustment if necessary. Or, instead of using Measure Properties, use the Split Measure command, and then simply delete the new empty first measure. Maybe there would be some way of making either of these processed more obvious?

Well, split measure seems a good idea at first, but esp. for a pickup measure this a) doesn't set the 'exclude from measure cound' and b) deleting the now empty portion first measure deletes the time sig, and this can have really bad effects (on non-4/4 scores)

Title Rules to resize bar 0 Changing actual measure duration should give the choice to keep first or last beats

If we implement this, I wouldn't do it specifically for the first measure. We could add a option that we will "pad" the content of the measure on the left or the right before resizing. After all, the same dilemna happens when making a measure longer, one might want to see the new beats at the start of the measure.
There might be some difficulties with spanners, ties etc...

An option will be excellent way. By default the bar is resized at the end part, as most usually employed, and by checking (or unchecking box) it is resized at the beginning.