Mirrored notehead when direction is reversed.

• Oct 28, 2017 - 08:09

Notice that if a user uses (Shift+X) to reverse a notehead (mirrored noteheads seem to be used more often in older scores as in 75+ years older) that the notehead is re-positioned as it should be, but there is no horizontal mirroring of the font. It's not that much of an issue, but when looked at scrupulously, the stem seems to be a tad awkward in relation to the notehead. This awkwardness wouldn't be the case if the shape of the notehead (which is often slanted slightly depending on the font used) were actually horizontally-mirrored rather than merely re-positioned. It isn't obvious whether the fonts provided offer mirrored noteheads, but it would most definitely be nice to have the option to mirror the noteheads as in truly mirroring them rather than re-positioning them.

Has anyone else noticed this? Is this not normal to do (true mirroring) and is the request unorthodox, or is it something that makes sense and should be the case but merely has yet to be implemented?

Thanks
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Comments

• Oct 28, 2017 - 23:55

Marc, your unfamiliarity makes sense; it doesn't seem to be standard. Most examples seen have been from hand-written scores wherein half-notes are practically rounded as compared with fonts, so true-mirroring wouldn't make sense. Maybe this isn't a good postulation.

On second thought, it's not the reversed notehead perse, but its the connection to its stem. Here are some images up close:

Here's a regular half note:
Selection_003.png

Here's a regular mirrored notehead of a half note.
Notice the distinction of the notehead with its stem:
Selection_004.png

Here's a mirrored half-note with the stem vertical position changed to -0.25 which makes it look more fitting:
Selection_005.png

Unless the disconnect between the notehead and stem as demonstrated is considered standard, maybe this vertical re-alignment of the stem should be automatically generated (but then its length would need to be elongated slightly) ? With that in mind, horizontally flipping the notehead would be needless.

Attachment Size
Selection_005.png 2.42 KB

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• Oct 29, 2017 - 16:34

Got it. I think the more common use case for mirrored heads has to do with the presence of unisons or seconds, and hence there is another notehead on the other side of the stem and we don't see this glitch.

We do have code to try to align the stems correctly for various notehead types - slash, etc. Probably just a small tweak would handle this case as well. Could you file this as a bug report in the issue tracker?

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