Properties to control slur automatic placement
Reported version
3.2
Priority
P2 - Medium
Type
Functional
Frequency
Once
Severity
S5 - Suggestion
Reproducibility
Always
Status
active
Regression
No
Workaround
No
Project
I'd like to suggest an option where, if a slur is selected, you can disable the slur's auto-adjust in the inspector, so that a slur isn't made steeper if its ends move too far away from the noteheads. Such an option in Format > Style would also be nice.
The reason for this is... when I need to manually adjust a slur, the slur-auto-adjust often takes over and messes up my manual adjustment. If I disable autoplace for the slur, I can easily adjust the slur without having to fight the slur-auto-adjust, but then I lose the collision-avoidance benefits of autoplace... in particular, the adjustment of staff-spacing so that the slur doesn't collide with staves above/below it.
Thanks for a fantastic scorewriter!!
Comments
Agreed that this would be good. The algorithm right now is, we construct and place a default slur, then check for collisions, and if we find any, we try to move the slur to avoid the collision, but if we have to move "too far", we add "a little" extra curvature then try again,
"some" number of times. The values for "too far", "a little", and "some" are hardcoded right now, these could be styled properties (so, both in style dialog and Inspector). Or maybe the "too far" and "a little" values would be style settings only, the "some" number could be a styled property, so that would be the one setting you'd override in the Inpsector - a value of 0 would turn off that code.
FWIW, though, I do find disabling autoplace is quite effective in the cases where the curvature is too much, and the results are actually better than what they were before we (ok, "I") added the code for the extra curvature. Without the extra curvature, you often got slurs that were "floating" too high above the notes just to avoid one accidental or something else that really you wouldn't have minded colliding. So in practice, I suspect you'd still end up deciding that disabling autoplace for many of these slurs completely is better.
Thanks Marc, I feel the slur-auto-adjust is a really step in the right direction as it lays the groundwork for more sophisticated slur-auto-adjustment in the future. So I'm happy its there. It just gets quite awkward when you want autoplace's benefits, but also need to do your own adjustments (a situation that arises quite often... S-shaped slurs for example). The extra properties you suggest sounds like they could add some of the needed flexibility to the feature.