Several questions about working with text (e.g., title and composer)

• Apr 25, 2023 - 05:47

I'm new to Muse Score, using version 4. I created an orchestral score with some ease, but now I'm struggling more than I think I should be with adding text (e.g., title, composer) to the tops of pages. My specific questions:

  1. How do I change the font size, position, etc. of text elements on the title page of the score only, and not have those changes affecting Parts pages? On the title page, I want large text centered vertically on the page, whereas on Parts pages, I want all text to be in a smaller font at the top.
  2. In Format > Style > "Text Styles", there are several options with the label "Align". The tooltip for each of these options mentions a "reference point". For example, "Center text on reference point", "Align top edge of text to reference point". What does it mean by "reference point"? In my case, the title is currently positioned in the center of the Parts pages, right in the middle of a staff. There's also a rectangle at the top of the page with a dashed border - I want all of my text objects on Parts pages to be inside that rectangle, but none of the "Align" options accomplish this. All options do have a visible effect on the position of the text object, but the text is always outside of the rectangle.
  3. I discovered that I can in fact manually click and drag a text object to place it inside the rectangle, but this only works for that text object. There doesn't seem to be a way to apply this manually changed layout to all Parts pages. (or is there?)
  4. When I click and drag a text object, there's a pink line that tethers the text object to the top left corner of the rectangle at the top of the page. Since every object seems to be anchored on that point, I wonder if that might be the illusive "reference point" mentioned in question 2, but I think probably not since the Align options don't work as I would expect them to if that were the case. What is the pink line telling me?
  5. Is there a help page or tutorial that explains all this?

Thanks!

Comments

• Apr 25, 2023 - 08:34

"In Format > Style > "Text Styles", there are several options with the label "Align". The tooltip for each of these options mentions a "reference point". What does it mean by "reference point"?"

I have no idea, and these Align options have never made any sense to me. As far as I am concerned, the "reference point" for Lyricist (left) and Composer (right) should be the bottom edge of their container (the vertical frame).

Any option for vertical alignment should surely be used to adjust the text position taking account of ascenders and descenders? This is an area where manual adjustment is often needed, for example when a lyricist's name has no descenders but the composer's name does have one of more descenders:
Vertical_offset_needed_for_descenders.png

For clarity, this is an illustration of descenders (p, g) and an ascender (d):
descenders_and_ascenders.png

Reply

• Feb 7, 2024 - 20:40

Are there plans to fix this problem with vertical header / footer alignment?

I figured out that if I include at least one capital letter and one letter than hangs below the line in each header/footer section, then the lines align vertically ... but that's awkward.

I'm using Musescore 4.2.1 on a Mac Mini M1

Attachment Size
Not align - footer - Screenshot 2024-02-07 at 2.52.09 PM.png 15.29 KB
Workaround - footer Screenshot 2024-02-07 at 3.12.00 PM.png 9.64 KB

Reply

• Feb 7, 2024 - 23:37

You have hit the same problem as trying to align Lyricist and Composer vertically in the title frame. The problem occurs when one field contains a letter with a descender, but the other field has no letters with descenders.

This has been a problem in MuseScore ... well, probably for ever. MuseScore insists on calculating the vertical positioning either by the baseline or by a descender (if any), when it should always be using the baseline (the bottom edge of letters without a descender).

Reply

• Feb 8, 2024 - 19:43

I noticed and reported it not a long time ago: https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/issues/20861
Got closed because it had already been reported (by you, hehe :): https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/issues/15930

Btw, while we are on the topic: have you seen mentions of / do you know something about an issue where mvoving a text object to the left or right causes the spacing between the letters to change? Very easy to reproduce:
1) Add a score title to a vertical frame (any other text object works too but the score title is big)
2) Select it and start pressing LEFT/RIGHT arrow keys repeatedly.
The text moves but the spacing between the letters varies with the horizontal position of the text.
I believe it is a Qt issue though. Just want to know if it is a known issue.

Reply

• Apr 26, 2023 - 05:00

Thanks everyone! These answers all helped me to narrow in on the problem. Ultimately I got this to make sense (sort of) by deleting my vertical frame from the top of the page and building a new one from scratch. Then, I could right click in the frame and add the desired text (title, composer, and part name) and could align those relative to the vertical frame using the align buttons, and "Apply to All Parts" worked so I only needed to align each text object once.

So in my case, with a vertical frame at the top of the page, the "reference point" for aligning text objects was the vertical frame itself. I'm not sure why the original wasn't working - apparently it had somehow gotten corrupted.

Another thing that still didn't work as I would expect is when I added Title, Composer, or Part Name, it didn't auto-populate those text objects with content. Since I have Work Title and Composer defined in Project Properties, I would expect Muse Score to do that. Instead, I had to type the text in manually. The same with Part Name: Of course it knows the part name, so why wouldn't it just add that name automatically?

Reply

Do you still have an unanswered question? Please log in first to post your question.