Limit Staff Types for instruments in score creation
When you add an instrument during score creation, you are given the option of selecting a Staff Type.
Depending on the instrument, should we limit what types are offered?
You could have for:
Keyboard instruments: Normal.
Guitar instruments: Normal and tablature.
Non-pitch instruments: Percussion.
If there's a special case, the user should change it in 'Staff Types...'.
Comments
In the case of percussion instruments there should be the choice between 1, 2, 3 and 5 lines in the staff.
In reply to In the case of percussion by ChurchOrganist
I wasn't sure about this, but I think you might be right.
While generally speaking it makes sense not to overburden the user with non-relevant choices, I am a bit reluctant to second this proposal: choices are not so many yet to make the selection difficult and the concept of 'special case' is subjective: without a few specific users, the dev team would have not immediately thought that balajkas or viols do use tablatures.
For percussions: the program has to rely on some source of info about what is and what is not a non-pitched percussion. Our instruments.xml specialist (of course I'm referring to ChurchOrganist!) can tell us if this file contains this info, beyond the mere belonging of an instruments to a group with a specific name. If this is true, it can be done.
About number of lines for percussions: in creating the perc. templates, I relied on lasconic advice and provided only 1, 3, and 5 lines. Of course, more can be added rather easily, if needed.
About tablatures: currently there is a left-over from a previous stage which automatically gives 6 guitar-like strings to any intrument which does not have any defined. My plan is to remove this trick and rely on strings defined in instruments.xml; this could allow to distinguish rather easily instruments for which offering the tab alternative could make some sense from instruments for which this surely does not make any sense.
This would simplify the drop list in a great number of cases.
Comments?
M.
P.S.: I am aware that the dlg could benefit from a wider layout (the preset drop list is often truncated at the right); so far, I was not able to obtain a better distribution of space between the different panes. In any case, this does not affect this issue, as each of the current choices would be displayed in one case or another.