Old-style quarter rest

• Jun 17, 2022 - 15:22

I realize that MuseScore makes available an old-style quarter rest symbol (like an eighth rest but facing the opposite direction). I have been making the default quarter rests invisible and then pasting the old-style ones as text elements. It would be very useful to access the older form automatically. A composition can include a large number of these symbols, and doing them by hand is time consuming. I found an old thread from six years ago about this, https://musescore.org/en/node/120151, but nothing seems to have happened since.

Suggestion: if you display the Inspector while a rest is selected, the heading Rest appears at the bottom with option of selecting a small size. Could another checkbox be added for "Old-style quarter rest"? This would be unobtrusive for those who don't need it. Thanks for considering this request.


Comments

Meanwhile, there shouldn't be a need to do them one by one. After you're done entering notes, try the following:

1) right-click one quarter rest
2) Select / More
3) Same duration, OK
4) press V to make invisible
5) press Z to display the Symbols palette
6) find and click the old-style quarter rest symbol

Done! You can do the whole score in just a few seconds this way.

As for a future feature, it seems to me that instead of needing the Inspector to change one by one, it would make more sense to just have a style setting to do this automatically. Just like we have for old-style mmrests in MuseScore 4.

In reply to by redux02

Well, I'm not sure it's better - I don't encounter the need for this myself. I'm brainstorming. The downside of a style setting is, it becomes all or nothing for a score. I don't know if it would be common to need to combine both styles in the same score. Or if there might be other reasons to prefer it being a per-rest setting. Ideally one might want it to available both ways, like it is for so many other settings - like you can set the font of an individual text element but also hit the "Set as style" button to make it apply to all elements of that type. However, I can see that would be complicated, because this setting wouldn't apply to all rests, just all quarter rests. Similar issues must have come up with the two breve noteheads you can select between via the Inspector.

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