How to contribute a new Palette to MuseScore

• May 25, 2021 - 21:06

Dear all,
I am taking classes to become music director, and I would like to use MuseScore also for doing Laban Movement Score Annotations. This can be done either using textual symbols or using pictograms. I prefer the latter, and I have prepared a custom palette with all the 27 core Laban symbols.
The images are from commons.wikimedia.org.
I was wondering if is possible to contribute it to the "core distribution" so that everyone can have it out of the box, and if so - how to proceed.
Thankyou and congratulations for maintaining and sharing this great software.

Comments

• May 25, 2021 - 22:51

Hi lucatoldo,

Before you can post your palette to the forum you'll need to Save it.

You can Save it by clicking the "... menu" above your palette and choosing "Save Palette ..."
This opens a dialog that allows you to name your .mpal palette file and designate a location to save it to.

Then you can attach the .mpal in any forum post.

scorster

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• May 26, 2021 - 08:08

Thankyou "Scorster" for your prompt and detailed help.
I have 2 related questions:
1) File format
JPG is obviously non auto-scalable, I was thinking to convert the images to SVG, would that be supported by MuseScore ?

2) Relative path instead of absolute path, in MuseScore user space
Before sharing the file I checked its content and noticed that palette.xml had the full path to the location of the images on my computer.
In order to make it easier to be "reused" I was then thinking to store the original images into a location that MuseScore3 already "knows", obviously not in the application installation folder (I am on Mac)..
Perhaps in the user defined space under "Documents/MuseScore3/Pictures/Laban".
Unfortunately, however when I do that still the full path is shown (and since I have a german OS, it uses Bilder instead of Pictures):
/Users/myuserid/Documents/MuseScore3/Bilder/Laban/Laban-frontal-high-right.jpg
Is there a way to make it more "portable" ?

Thankyou !

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• May 26, 2021 - 08:16

Thankyou Jo-Jo you are always super fast, hyper detailed and mega concise !
Just for reference for others, on a Mac Book, this is how to convert all jpg into svg command line assuming that the files to be converted are all in the same folder (directory).

brew install imagemagick
brew install potrace
for f in *.jpg; do convert ./"$f" ./"${f%.jpg}.svg"; done

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• May 26, 2021 - 09:57

Yes, sure you found that mistake.
I looked then into libmscore/image.cpp and at lines
367- 381 the code is very clear

    if (!_storePath.isEmpty()) {
        _storeItem = imageStore.getImage(_storePath);
        if (_storeItem) {
            _storeItem->reference(this);
            loaded = true;
        }
        // if no image in store, attempt to load from path (for backward compatibility)
        else {
            loaded = load(_storePath);
        }
        path = _storePath;
    }
    // if no success from store path, attempt loading from link path (for .mscx files)
    if (!loaded) {
        _linkIsValid = load(_linkPath);
        path = _linkPath;
    }

Therefore apparently the problem is that the images although are in the zip, actually are not found and therefore it needs to load them from the linkPath..
Would be great to be able to see the output of the qDebug statements in MuseScore when it executes..

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• May 25, 2021 - 23:50

I'm not sure if everyone would need it out of the box but it would certainly seem a good idea to have a library of palettes that more experienced or specialised users could download as needed. I have one for dynamics above and below the stave for piano-vocal arrangements, a custom tempo palette with various text entries and a custom Lines palette.

On a Laban-related topic (although, I admit, a shameless plug) - Trinity Laban’s BA3 Musical Theatre students take to the stage with the musical comedy The Addams Family streaming from tomorrow night: https://www.trinitylaban.ac.uk/whats-on/event/trinity-laban-musical-the…

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• May 26, 2021 - 08:15

Hi Underquark, I fully agree with you that the use of Laban palette might be limited, however it could facilitate the cross talk between composer / arrangeur / musician / conductor and also dancer, thus extending the use of MuseScore to also encompass choreography . Thankyou for sharing the link of the great Trinity Laban institution. In order to know more about the use of Labanotation and in general the approach of codifying movement also for conductors, however, the appropriate reference is to the textbook of James Jordan, the inventor of Laban Movement Score Analysis https://www.giamusic.com/products/P-7129.cfm

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• May 26, 2021 - 15:45

I'm not familiar with these symbols, but if they are in common use in a musical context, they should probably be proposed for inclusion in the SMuFL standard, at which point they'd also be included in Bravura and hence in MuseScore.

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• May 27, 2021 - 19:05

After some experimentation, i finally managed to create the Laban movement custom palette, and it is here attached for public reuse.
The images are all taken from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:ListFiles?user=Jeffrey+Scott… and are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
I only included the original 27 pictograms from Laban and did not add the new glyphs that Dr Longstaff proposed in his Thesis and papers, however extending that would not be difficult now that I have learned how to do it.
A key aspect in the learning had been access to the source code of MuseScore, and a second one has been running mscore -d that allowed me to see the debugging messages that are already available in MuseScore.
Thankyou to all the developers / contributors ! The MuseScore system is simply great.

Attachment Size
laban-distrib.mpal 20.1 KB

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