Suggestion: Toggle Automatic Beaming Starting on Upbeats (in Common Time)

There have been other requestions to provide a way to get this result, but somehow I don't think anyone has come up with such a conceptually simple approach to it. It always seemed like it would be some complex set of controls needed to provide full generality. I haven't thought it through, but on the surface, I do like this idea of a single checkbox that covers the most common cases.

Right-click on the time signature, and then click "Time Signature Properties".

That doesn't honor upbeats, just sets a general pattern, not what's being asked for here

Right, but this dialog doesn't allow distinguishing these cases. The common rule one might want to follow is, beam a group of four eighth notes, but on ly if it's complete - all four eighths in the group. If the patterns starts - or, and actually this is even more crucial - ends in a rest, you don't want to beam the remaining three. In fact, some would say don't beam the first three eighths if the last is a rest, but it's OK to beam the last three if the first is. And then considering all the other possibilities like sixteenths, or groupings of three or six notes in compound meter, it started to feel like a big job to handle all possible cases.

But a single checkbox that says "Don't beam groups starting on upbeat" could be very useful as a way of catching the most important cases. The trick would be wording it well, defining exactly what "upbeat" means here, etc. Like, I started thing, any group starting with a rest, but that's not right, we still want to be the last two eighths of a group that starts with a quarter rest. And what does this mean in compound meter? So it actually is difficult to really nail down. But reducing the scope of the problem helps.

BTW, from what I recall of the code, we actually process this one note at a time, so we don't necessarily know when we start processing a group whether there are rests further down the line. So handling the case of three eighths followed by a rest is harder. I said it's more crucial, because such groupings are more likely to be mistaken for triplets. But it's also much less common, since in this case, the third eighth would more likely be written as a quarter.