Large time signatures (and text opacity?)
I just downloaded Musescore 4 and have been exploring for the last few hours. I'm on Big Sur 11.4 (meaning I downloaded it without the Muse Hub software)
As a film composer, something that's really essential for my work is being able to make time signatures large for a conductor to read. In Musescore 3 this was done with a plugin called Big Time, but that doesnt work here, and I was really hoping the update would natively include the feature!
I can't seem to find a way to do it cleanly, so I was figuring out a workaround by making a custom text style with the correct font, manually typing the numbers of the time signature, dragging it over the existing time signature, and making the existing time signature transparent. While doing this I realized there's no opacity slider on the colour options - which is also something I use quite often, to highlight sections.
I know these 2 issues aren't exactly related, except in this specific case - so does anyone have answers for either of them?
Comments
The missing opacity is a known regression: https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/issues/13652
Wouldn't it for your use case work to mark the other time signatures as invisible instead of transparent?
In reply to The missing opacity is a… by jeetee
Thanks for the response. That's what I'll have to do with the lack of an opacity control, but it's not ideal because:
1. Making it invisible changes the size of the measure (MS3 used to leave the spacing unaffected), so this means you have to manually change the leading space of the element for every bar with a new time signature.
2a. While working, you can still see the invisible element and it clutters the page pretty badly, especially if there are multiple time signature changes on a page. Changing the leading space of the text (my point 1) makes the invisible time signature sit right on top of the first note of the measure (like in the screenshot).
2b. If you move the invisible time sigature to the side of the page to avoid all the clutter, you then have to manually reset the offset on each part - if you're working with lots of instruments this is time consuming, and if there are multiple time signatures on the page, can also be very confusing.
I'm used to workarounds - it just seems like the update has made a fairly simple workaround much more difficult than it needs to be.
In reply to Thanks for the response… by shireenghosh
You can turn off the display of invisible elements via the View > Show menu. It's far from a solution but might help soften the pain in the meantime.