sad state of command line option documentation

• Nov 6, 2018 - 21:11
Type
Functional
Frequency
Once
Severity
S4 - Minor
Reproducibility
Always
Status
closed
Regression
No
Workaround
No
Project

The manpage musescore(1) is the same between 2.3 and git master. There are several problems with it:

  • several options are not documented at all
  • the three new options of master are also not documented (obviously)
  • one option (-T) is even misdocumented
  • the list is not sorted (normal sort order: case-insensitively by short option letter (per letter: uppercase before lowercase), followed by GNU long options without a short equivalent, sorted in the same manner)

I’ve attached a list of all command line options I could find in musescore.cpp and the current manpage, and where problems are.

Attachment Size
d.txt 807 bytes

Comments

I’d be willing to provide an updated manual page in mdoc format, if someone could provide me with correct documentation text snippets for all options marked as 'miss'(ing), NEW (in master) or WRONG, together with what the optarg should be named, if any.

Does that -job json feature where you export to parts by adding out: ["first-halfof-filename", "second-half-of-filename"] to the json really work?

I'm going to ask the forbidden question: Is there an option that the website uses to extract the screen position and dimensions of each measure in its page (for is pink box)?

!!!! What will science think of next!?!!? This is pretty remarkable. This is all one needs to implement a private web player. Thanks (as well as for the improved command-line documents!)!

In reply to by Jer Roque

Well, '--score-parts-pdf' will generate per-part PDFs, you'd need to split the resulting JSON file into separate pdf files (but that's trivial with a simple python/perl/whatever script).
And, yes, a separate pdf-parts format for ' --export-to' would have been nice.

In reply to by rmattes

Reported version 2.3  

--export-score-parts generates all the parts, but it generates one PDF. The PDF contains the score, and then appends each part after it. Is there a way to, from an MSCZ that has a score + six parts, generate seven PDFs, one for the score, and one for each individual part?

In reply to by Jer Roque

Yes, the PR I referenced in my last comment allows you to do precisely that, from the command line.

It’s incidentally coupled to the PR merging the new manpage because I document it in there. (I removed the not-yet-merge parts from the online handbook page for now.)

Status PR created fixed

Fixed in branch master, commit e292cfb527

_fix #277903: new manpage

Completely rewritten manpage, with improved documentation for most
aspects of the program, and documentation of the better batch con‐
version (see PR 4166). The new mscore.1.preview.sh shell script is
intended to be used for previewing changes, by developers._

Fix version
3.1.0