custom pallet placement location

• Jan 18, 2025 - 18:19

Custom Palette notation doesn't get inserted at the proper place on the score for many types of custom icons.

To see what I'm talking about, create a custom palette, and put a special character from the first screenshot into one of the palette icons.
characters will not place well

Select a note on your score, and then click on your custom palette icon. It sticks it in a spot which always needs adjusting.
bad placement
bad placement

Compare that to clicking on a normal accent or staccato icon - that places the notation nicely above or below the full chord, with nice spacing.

Custom palettes work OK with drag and drop onto the score, but this makes it very slow to put notation exactly where it should be and makes it hard to ensure consistency across a score.

I have a custom pallet for handbell notation, with all the various types of articulation that handbells play. I would like to be able to select all the notes that I want to apply an articulation to and click on a table mallet pallet icon and have it place the notation in the proper position in relation to each note in the score. Instead, the articulations are all added, but then need to be manually adjusted. Right now the default location is generally covering up staff lines or ledger lines.

The notation should end up in the same place and have the same notation rules that any other normal accent or note articulation should have, like staccato or marcato, etc. Those work fine when you click on their palette icons. Why wouldn't custom palette icons work the same way?

Currently I either have to drag each notation mark individually (resulting in inconsistent notation unless I am extremely careful), or else I have to select all of them and apply positioning to get them all closer where they should be, but this also ends up being wrong since there are different values of Y position that need to be applied to different notes, especially if there are multiple voices or other nearby notations, (which there usually are in handbell music).

In my screenshot all of the yellow dotted notations could work exactly like normal accents, but they don't.

Is there a way to make them work the same way? I'm thinking there is not and it is a bug.


Comments

In reply to by DanielR

OK, single clicking is good to know (but that's not what my post was about). When I click the custom palette item it doesn't do what I would expect.

Why doesn't it work as expected? Is there a way to get it to put the notation in the proper placement so that, for example, it isn't covering ledger lines or in a seemingly random spot which will always need to be moved?

In reply to by danielgibby

Click a note or rest. Then click the tool in the palette. The tool's notation will be added to the selected note/rest.

If you need to do multiple of them, you can multi-select. Two ways to do this, for different needs.

* Click one note/rest. Shift+click another note/rest elsewhere. Shift+click selects all notes from the first click to the second.

* Click one note/rest. Ctrl+click another note/rest elsewhere. Ctrl+click toggles the new note into and out of the current selection.

N.B. Both of these work the same in many different applications.

An occasionally useful technique if you need to select most of the items in a row. Click the first note. Shift+click the last note. This selects all the notes from first to last. Then Ctrl+click to remove the notes that do not need to be selected.

Hope this helps :-)

In reply to by danielgibby

I read your message. My message is a direct response to that. (You didn't say anything about knowing how to use MuseScore and, indeed, you didn't know that a single click is the way to add a marking without drag-n-drop.)

I looked at your screenshot and it told me nothing; it provided no information whatsoever on your problem. As far as I can see, your symbols are being added to the same place an accent would be added.

In reply to by underquark

I'm not asking for help on how to click or double click a palette icon. You can double click (and it works the same way as a single click). The fact that it used to be a double click and that it still works when you double click is proof that I have been using MuseScore for a long time (over 15 years).

Please read the original post where I clearly describe what the problem is.

I was trying to be respectful and not calling the problem a flat out bug, just in case (as I described completely in my original post) I had missed seeing in the interface where it is possible to adjust where the notation gets placed, but it seems like it is a bug. I already know you can adjust the notation on the icon. I'm talking about where the notation gets placed in relation to the note on the actual score.

If you can use a normal palette and it works the way you'd expect, but you use other types of notation characters on a custom palette and it doesn't place them in a good place- that's a bug.

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