Track changes??

This may be a completely off-the-wall idea, but I'll throw it out there for discussion. What the heck--the goal is to make MuseScore better than any other scorewriter out there, bar none. So let's see where this could take us.

In publishing music, doing the original input of the music (whether copied from a contemporary edition or a new composer's MS) is often the smallest part of the work. Once the input is 'done', a LOT of time is subsequently spent editing and revising it, and usually there are several people involved (associate editors, instrumental specialists, whatever), in that process. When they're all done contributing their musical expertise, the whole score has to be proofread at least twice (by two different teams), before it is finally ready to print. Only this way can a publisher know that he's done his 'due diligence' to provide the ultimate users--the performers-- with a quality product that contains as few errors as possible (there are rarely none at all, but that's a fact of publishing we won't solve here).

Anyway, that's a lot of changes to a single original score, and keeping track of them all can be a major task in and of itself. In publishing text works, editors and writers use word processing programs such as MS WORD, most of which contain some sort of 'Track Changes' tool. This enables ALL changes made to the base text file to be seen by everyone involved and tracked, accepted or rejected; it also enables the author, editor, copy-editor, and proofreaders to add comments and questions to the text when necessary.

I'm in the process of comparing edits on a bass figuring from an associate specialist editor to the original figuring written by the composer of a new work. The only way I have found to comment or question the FB editor's changes to the figuring is to add comments as 'lyrics', and, while this works, it's clumsy and time consuming. (And if the piece had actual lyrics in it, it would really be a mess, but that's not the case for this particular score.)

Would it be possible for something like the MS Word 'Track Changes' utility to be developed to work with MuseScore? Such a tool would show changes in a different colour (or even a different colour for each editor/proofreader), and would comprise an 'accept/reject' function as well. If that's not practical, could we at least develop a new class of text, 'Comment Text', which could be anchored to any element (including bass figures), and would then highlight that element in yellow (or whatever), and show the comment text only when the mouse is hovered over the anchor element? Either or both of these tools would be a great boon to professional users, as well as to music educators who want to correct their students' homework assignments in digital form.