vertical placement of text above the staff
It would be incredibly helpful if there was a way to control the order of how text above a staff is stacked from top to bottom without having to delete them all and start over. For instance, when the same measure starts with a rehearsal number, system text, and staff text, it would be great if you could drag and drop each component above or below one another to rearrange them, having them snap into place. I imagine that would not be an easy fix necessarily, and I love how much better the automatic formatting works in MuseScore 3, but this would certainly be a convenience if it's manageable. Thank you.
Comments
I agree with you, and perhaps one day that will be implemented. In the mean time, you can disable automatic placement on one or two of the text items that are in the wrong order and the other(s) will auto place and you can move the ones without auto placement to where you want them using version 2 methods. To disable auto placement, select an item and remove the check from Automatic placement in the inspector.
In general, we try obey standard engraving practice for most elements, but "staff text" is of course pretty generic, could be used for lots of things. One thing we could think about is special casing that type and allowing "stacking order" in the Inspector to affect it. Certainly, we could also be doing that to set the order if there are multiple staff texts on the same note. On the other hand, simply choosing the right type of text helps to - don't try to abuse rehearsal marks for other purposes just to get the frames - instead, use staff text and add the frame.
Meanwhile, I have a change pending to allow Alt+drag to automatically disable automatic placement.
Could you attach a score you are wanting to change order on and show us exactly where, so we can see if there a good way to come up with a more flexible solution?
In reply to In general, we try obey… by Marc Sabatella
I tend to follow the exact rules you suggest, using specific types of text where applicable and reformatting staff or system text as needed. When I have the time, I should do what I did in version 2 and create some personalized text styles and save them so I have more options without having to manually reformat anything different.
In any event, if you look at measure 77 in the attached score, once the items are input, their order is locked unless you uncheck "Automatic placement." If you try to just drag them, it forces the same vertical stacking order. So if you try to drag "Even for You" lower, it snaps back to where it was. If you try to drag "freely" higher, everything above it just gets pushed up so that it's all still above "freely" and there's a big gap above the staff.
Again, nothing's broken. It would just be a great convenience to be able to drag the items instead of having to re-enter them in a different order or disabling the automatic placement and having to move everything around manually. MuseScore 3 is a major leap forward for automatic formatting and I'm grateful for all the time I'm saving at the end of arranging, not having to micromanage every little visual placement. This would just be one more improvement.
Thanks.
In reply to I tend to follow the exact… by Daniel O'Meara
FWIW, as I may have mentioned, I have a change pending where Alt+drag will disable automatic placement. Also this change adds the ability to define a keyboard shortcut for it.
Still, if I were you I'd be thinking about ways of defining things to not need this. In measure 77, I see four texts. One is a general style instruction "freely", then there is a boxed text "Even For You" that I am guessing represents a song title (this is a medley, right?), and then a boxed measure number, then a tempo marking. It sounds like you are saying you want the song titles to be below general instructions. As you've seen simply entering them in that order gives that result. So just cutting "freely" and pasting it back to the same spot fixes this.
But still, I'd want a better strategy - a way to specify that certain texts should be below others in general, say as part of the style. Right now, you aren't using a user style for the song titles, but I'd recommend it pick, say, User-1, define it to have the box and other attributes, and then always use for song titles (you can also change the name of the style in Format / Style / Text Styles).
That doesn't solve the autoplace issue, though. But, what if we added a field to the text style definition that controlled ordering, so you could make all User-1 texts (or whatever you rename that to - "Song Title", say). Seems like that could be a generally useful solution for issues like this.