Hide complexity for staff size
I hope this is something already in the pipeline. Staff sizes are normally measured as a human being would do it: by the height of the whole staff. There is however no way of telling Musescore this humanly readable height. Musescore needs the height divided by 4 in the page settings, since it needs an sp unit. This is not a humanly readable unit, and it doesn’t provide any meaningful connection to established guidelines like the MOLA guidelines https://mola-inc.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/files/mola3/MOLA-Guidelines…. I propose to have Staff size in page settings instead of a sp value. Musescore should divide the user input by 4 and use it for the rest of the layout rules internally.
Comments
You are assuming that a stave always consists of 5 lines and 4 spaces; this is not the case. (but I agree it is a very common case and makes sense as a reference point as well)
So perhaps it would indeed be more user friendly to also show and give the possibility to set the total height of a 5 line staff in addition to the current input field.
In reply to You are assuming that a… by jeetee
dear jeetee, I’m not assuming anything. If you read the MOLA guidelines amongst other, you see that what is meant universally by Staff Size is the height of a five line staff. This is a layout convention not created by me. That the software indeed needs to scale that internally (also for 1 line staves) is another thing. That’s what my proposal is.
sp stands for Spatium, which is a term from typography since Gutenberg
In reply to sp stands for Spatium, which… by Jojo-Schmitz
perhaps I’m not being clear. The use of “sp” is indeed quite standard. I’m not proposing to remove it or to change it to something else for everything that depends on the sp definition. What I’m proposing is to take the sp definition from the Staff Size standard, which is not measured in sp but in mm and corresponds to the total height of a five line staff. Right now Musescore has it the other way around: the user specifies the sp and by multiplying by 4, you can know what the staff size is. This is quite impractical, since it doesn’t conform to what is usually expected. If you have evidence of guidelines that use a definition of sp for staff sizes instead of the actual staff size as measured in representative layout guidelines, I’d be glad to be instructed.
In reply to perhaps I’m not being clear… by m.r-botero
I believe it is not even measured in mm but in dots or printer points per inch
In reply to I believe it is not even… by Jojo-Schmitz
That’s even worse ;-). If I put a staff size of 7.0mm in the page settings, I know exactly what to expect. With 1,764 or whatever the value I enter, I have barely any idea of what I’m doing and what it’s gonna look like.
In reply to That’s even worse ;-). If I… by m.r-botero
You have reason to be optimistic. Oktophonie worked for a music publisher and mentioned the issue with staff sizes not conforming to MOLA (though he didn't mention MOLA) and staff sizing is one of the issues he is addressing probably for 4.0 but possibly 3.6.
In reply to You have reason to be… by mike320
It’s in the pipeline? Great!