Fix bar lines in place
When you start writing a lead sheet by hand, the first thing you do is place the bar lines so that there's 4 bars of equal length in each system.
Also when you look at the newer real books, that's the way lead sheets look. It makes improvisation easier, when you can "see" the harmonies in the right places.
Right now in musescore bar lines get moved automatically depending on the content of the bar. Notes increase the length of the bar and rests shorten it. You can manually increase/decrease layout stretch, but I can never get it to look perfect.
I would love a function that "locks" bar lines in place, especially when working with the jazz lead sheet template, to get the look of a handwritten lead sheet with the bar lines in the the same place in each system.
Comments
Try working with minimal measure size to create similar width measures. Then work with stretch and/or scaling to shrink your notation down again so those measures fit within a system.
In reply to Try working with minimal… by jeetee
Yes that's how I do it now, but it's a lot of work and doesn't give me the desired result.
In reply to Yes that's how I do it now,… by johannesgoell
Last version of MuseScore that had a fixed measure width option was 1.3.
It didn't work well, so got removed
In reply to Yes that's how I do it now,… by johannesgoell
If it doesn't work well, then likely it is because your measure content is requiring a bigger measure than you're willing to give it.
Feel free to attach an example score of where it doesn't give you the desired result.
It's worth noting that the original reason for handwritten charts doing this isn't readability but laziness. It's "hard" to plan out the sizes of your measures, so people took the easy route of just drawing in barlines first then trying to squeeze the notes in. The downside is inconsistent spacing of notes within a system, and it's actually a pretty major downside. But an accidental upside was, indeed, is that if you're only looking at chord symbols and not notes, the spacing of the chord symbols tells you the story of what is happening with them rhythmically. So even with notation software that can do the right thing in terms of consistent spacing of notes, sometimes we like to fudge things to make the chord symbols closer to even, to make those rhythms more consistent.
MuseScore 4 will likely have additional controls to help with this, but meanwhile, setting a larger minimum measure width will often help, and then just a little fiddling with the stretch can produce an excellent compromise between completely equally-spaced, versus completely proportionally-spaced, so that neither notes nor chords are unduly difficult to read.
If you need further help with this, attach a score so we can understand and assist better.