Cross-staff notation across non-adjacent staves

• Jan 10, 2025 - 05:28

I've been engraving some early-mid 20th century piano scores by French and Italian composers who have some passages with additional staves to separate voices.

I have some cases where there is cross-staff notation from the top treble staff that needs to go to the bass staff, but it appears I can only get "half way" to the intervening lower treble staff.

In the example below, I can't do the yellow moves, but the up+down moves marked in orange are fine. cross-staff-notation.png

In this case I've worked around by situating that voice in the middle stave and pushing up/down. However I have some 4 staff scores where this doesn't work.

There are also cases where I have started the score with two staves having cross-staff notation, and subsequently added an additional staff. In these cases, Musescore now shifts the cross-staff notes into the wrong staff. When I use the style settings to hide the empty staves, it thinks these staves are NOT empty, and so I have to re-do all the measures with cross-staff notation. cross-staff notation - notes in wrong staff.png
This measure was relatively easy one to fix but many measures had a lot of position-sensitive notation with tuplets and serpentine slurs that are horrible to interpolate with additional in-staff voices.

In any case, the feature needs a sense of moving notes to a fixed rather than relative staff.

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