Note spacing when entering chords

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Sorry, I didn't realize you meant chord name text. Thanks for the picture and clarification.

In most instances you would not want the chord name to interfere with the spacing of the notes. Often chords only change every measure or half measure (especially for the type of music that chord names are normally used for). For example a "F Maj 7" above an eighth note should not interfere with the spacing of the note if the chord actually applies to the whole measure.

The behavior of the chord names in MuseScore actually matches that of Sibelius and Finale. On the rare occasion that you have a chord name on every note and the chord names overlap then the best workaround is to add a line break. Automating all of this is probably beyond the capabilities of MuseScore for right now. Given that it easy to work around and relatively rare, I am marking as "won't fix" for now.

I guess I'm behind the times. I was using Sibelius 5.

The magnetic layout feature you are talking about Morton is indeed a great improvement in Sibelius 6. This might be something for the future for MuseScore when it's past the 1.0 milestone. But I presume it will not be easy to implement.

Tried out MuseScore - this is one of the only things keeping me from adopting it completely. I write out a lot of jazz charts, and currently they all end up jumbled and with overlapping chord names :( It would be great if this could be fixed - Sibelius 7 copes better than MuseScore but it still isn't anywhere near perfect - it can't be THAT hard to implement, can it?

Cheers for the great software,
Jarrad

See this perhaps?

To be clear:

The desired algorithm should be that the next note is *not* always adjusted to make room for a chord symbol (this is what Finale gets wrong if you ask it to incorporate chird symbols in the spacing algortihm). So in a measure consisting of a bunch of sixteenths but only one chordname oer the first sixteenth, there shoukd be no haps between the sixteenths.

Instead, no spacing adjustments should be made until you enter another chordname. At that point, if this chordname will overlap the previous chordname, the spacing of all notes between the previous chordname and this one should be stretched until the chordnames no longer overlap.

BTW, while this is occasionally an issue, it isn't nearly as big an issue as you might think while you are first wnering the notes and chords, because in most cases, you will be adding line breaks or otherwise stretching out the notation during the layout phase. I have done hundreds of charts, and by the time I set them to be four bars per line (or whatever), overlaps are pretty rare. And they are usually easily handled by nudging the chordnames left or right via keyboard. It's actually better than Finale in this respect. Still, automatic spacing would be appreciated.

No text (chords, lyrics, ...) should re-space the notes... Spacing music is more important than spacing texts. If text will overlap another text, we must insert a break in order to have less bar in the line. In the same line, all the quarter must have the same space, all the eight must have the same space, all the etc... with text or with no text under notes.
It's the job of the engraver to avoid collisions. But please, it's important to respect music spacing.
I think !

If you look at published jazz charts, you will see that this idea of equal spacing within a line is not always honored. Chord symbols really are special. Notes really are spaced woder at times to accomodate them. And even beyond the world of jazz, the same is true of lyrics, but these are already handled more appropriately. In any event, it would also be possible to implement an "equal note spacing with the line" algorithm that nonetheless avoided chord symbol collisions, not that I think that is necessarily way to go.

Fwiw, in Finale, it's an *option* to take chord symbols into account, but as I said, it doesn't really work correctly. It just created a huge gap before the next note rather than spreading out all notes before the next chord symbol as necessary. In MuseScore, I think it would make sense for this to be a style setting, and I would have no problem with it being off by default (the Jazz templates would turn it on).

What Marc describes as bad behavior in Finale (comments #10 and #12 above), is actually the extent of sophistication MuseScore uses even for lyrics! Adopting the current lyrics algorithm for chord names would solve the rare cases mentioned here, but introduce uneven (incorrect) note spacing for almost every other instance--not a good tradeoff.

As mentioned above: Automating all of this is probably beyond the capabilities of MuseScore for right now.

Thanks to Tony, this has been working for a while now!