Turns: if too close to one another, get a staircase effect

Your image is blank for me, but I'm guessing you are describing the same thing as #280853: Fermatas: if too close to one another, get a staircase effect

It is blank due to transparent background and Chorme not properly showing this, I found a Chrome extension the other day to fix that (but not yet for my mobile)
And yes, it is that staircase effect. Not sure it is a duplicate though, both cases may need to get treated differently?

workaround: don't squeeze that many measure into a system

Fermatas and articulations are indeed different types so handling is different; didn't mean to imply it would literally be a duplicate issue. Just that indeed the effect is similar and a similar type of solution would be needed.

BTW, regarding the image, I did figure the background was an issue with Chrome, but saw the same loading into IrfanView, fooling me into thinking it was more than that.

I have two potential solutions I have implemented in https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/pull/5013. But because that PR is reallly about a totally different issue, I left the code comment out, so a separate PR would be needed.

The two solutions are 1) make sure we add more space before/after notes with accents to avoid collisions, or 2) go ahead and allow collisions. The downside of 1) is it does mean measures with wide articulations (turns, accents, trills) might take more space. The downside of 2) is of course, collisions, but it's not necessarily so bad makes sense for accents, which due to their shape can nest inside each other rather than actually collide. And I would be willing to bet that closely-placed accents are much more common than closely-placed turns, trills, or other wide articulations. But I'm open to feedback about this.

Perhaps someone could alter autoplacement so that the staircase effect happens downwards.

Assuming you mean, a few steps up but then jump back down as soon as there is room (so, a zig-zag up & down pattern), yes, that's come up before regarding text, and I agree it would be a good idea. There are indeed ways it could be done but not exactly simply. It's on the radar, though.

I can't resist: "one good turn deserves another", says the conventional wisdom.

I know this is an old issue, but, JoJo, I see you recently commented about it and it is on the active issue listing. Just wanna say, apparently, you get the staircase effect when ANY element is too close to another element, not just turns. None of the comments mentions that. I notice it when I have fret diagrams or chord symbols too close to one another. Also, when I import MIDI scores, Musescore apparently has trouble translating tempo changes. Sometimes Musescore will indicate a tempo change on 20 consecutive notes, which creates a staircase effect on the tempo changes.

Automatic placement for the ornaments can be turned off individually, eliminating the staircase effect, but then they overlap, of course. Trying to manually achieve the zig-zag pattern by allowing some of the ornaments to be placed automatically seems futile. Maybe an option would be to make it so that ornaments close to each other give more space between the notes (similarly to how accidentals do).

See my comment in https://musescore.org/en/node/280896#comment-918614. It's doable, I basically did it already, but it does result in measures taking more space and thus potentially having an adverse effect on existing scores, and so this code is disabled. Some day maybe we will add an option to enable it. For now, my best advice is to user looser spacing so this doesn't happen. Either score-wide, or just stretch the affected measures.

Relates to #311175: [EPIC] Engraving issues and suggestions

Also happens with others e. g. trills and can be fixed by moving them down so instead of
s
s
s
s
it is
s s
s s
Where s is a fermata, trill, turn, etc.
If there is a descending line it can be even better.