Regression in MuseScore 2—Em dash (—) not supported

• May 3, 2015 - 15:47
Type
Functional
Severity
S4 - Minor
Status
closed
Project
MuseScore

The em dash—a very common character—I use it all the time—is—to my surprise—somehow not properly supported in MuseScore 2.0. In text fields, it comes out as an underscore; in things like Style names, it comes out as a question mark. The bizarre thing is that copying and pasting the character into a text box works, and it imports from 1.3 as well. It's only impossible to type it.

Comments

• May 3, 2015 - 17:39

How would you expect to type it? It's not a standard ASCII character, nor do most keyboards have a way of generating it directly, so unfortunately, support for the character varies.

I'm thinking we should probably add it to the "Common" section of the "Special Characters" palette (F2). But FWIW, it's Unicode character 0x2014, and appears on page 32 if you select the "All" section, and works fine when added that way.

Reply

• May 4, 2015 - 00:39

Different version of Qt is probably why. Could be they deliberately wanted to remove some of the system-specific stuff, or it could be a bug.

Anyhow, I do think it would make sense to add en and em dashes to Special Characters.

Reply

• May 4, 2015 - 01:51

Ha! You'll never believe this, but—

Okay, this is complicated.

So, on a Mac, the F2 key is assigned to the system-wide function of "increase screen brightness". Adding the fn key to a keyboard shortcut overrides the system-wide default and lets the application-specific function work (so, for example, though F10 is the shortcut to bring up the Mixer in MuseScore, and this is the shortcut that appears next to it in the View menu, it won't work—the user has to figure out to use fn+F10).

So, I curiously tried fn+F2 in MuseScore. Result: the key signature changed. Seriously confused at this point. Then I tried searching the menus for Special Characters, and found it, at the bottom of the Edit menu. The shortcut? Ctrl+cmd+space. (Hey, wait, I thought in MuseScore 2 we didn't do platform-specific shortcuts anymore!) So, I used that shortcut. Surprise, surprise! What came up was the Mac operating system's own character palette! The same shortcut works in any application.

Somebody at MuseScore is very, very clever to have set this up.

Oh, and the em dash is there—see attached screenshot. So, a Mac-specific problem, counter-balanced by a Mac-specific feature. This is so devilishly funny I can't stop smiling as I write this.

characters.png

Any questions?

Reply

• May 4, 2015 - 03:10

For the record, F2 in *normal mode* is mapped to transpose semitone. You have to be in *text edit* mode for F2 to bring up special characters.

I think the Special Charactets you are seeing in the Edit menu is not put there by MuseScote - I gather on Mac it is normal for the OS and application menus to get intertwined.

Reply

• May 5, 2015 - 02:55

Not entirely fixed. I'm glad to see I can now type a dash in a text box, but, as I originally said, "in things like Style names, it comes out as a question mark." This is still true. Is it fixable?

Reply