View mode interface suggestion

• Dec 28, 2014 - 20:35

The option to change viewing modes from Page View to Continuous View currently cannot be found under the View menu. I think that's where it belongs.

Comments

• Jan 3, 2015 - 13:21

When switching PageView <-> ContinuousView the score is actually reformatted for the new view. Doing this the actual score is changed and manual tweaking for some elements can get lost. To go back you have to Undo the switch.
So i think the switch does not belong to the View menu. The name "View" is somehow wrong for the operation but i did not found a better one.

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• Jan 3, 2015 - 13:38

The View menu was called Display in 1.x and I think that is what it really does, it displays another window like synthesizer, mixer, inspector etc.
Page view vs. continuous view changes how the score is viewed.

Hmm, maybe better name it Page Mode and Continuous Mode?

A (change of) View shouldn't change the score, a change of Mode would be expected to?

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• Jan 3, 2015 - 23:31

Well, if it comes down to it, I think many of the things now placed under the View menu actually would make the most sense under a separate Window menu. That would include the windows for the Synthesizer, Play Panel, etc., but also "Documents Side by Side" and "Documents Stacked."

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• Jan 4, 2015 - 15:46

Well, I just looked at several applications to check whether I might be mistaken, and they've got Window menus with that type of thing under them (alongside and not instead of their respective View menus). VLC Media Player's Window menu is shown in the attached screenshot. Items such as "Video Effects" open up separate windows, like Jojo was talking about.

By the way, every app that has a "Zoom In" and "Zoom Out" has them under the Window menu.

Attachment Size
VLC Window menu.png 36.4 KB

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• Jan 4, 2015 - 21:13

For some reason, that possibility didn't occur to me. I knew that Mac and some Linux operating systems always displayed a global menu bar, and that Windows and some Linux operating systems attached a smaller menu bar to each individual window, but the idea that those menu bars might have different content? Never crossed my mind. But I just looked at VLC in Zorin on a virtual machine, and there's no Window menu. Weird.

We've gone a little bit off topic, haven't we?

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• Jan 4, 2015 - 18:22

Each program has its own menu system and you get used to it. If it came to the vote then I'd lay the menus out like this purely so new users are more likely to find things where they think they will be:

File
New, Open, Save, Save As..., Export, Print etc.

Edit
Pretty much as it is already:
Undo, redo, copy, paste

View
Toggle on or off what additional things you can see
- palettes, Inspector, invisible things, frames

Insert
Add notes, frames, symbols

Format
Essentially combining the items currently in Layout and Style
Page layout, General style, text styles, load and save styles

Display (or Window)
The physical seeing of the score ie how it appears
Zoom in and out
Scores displayed side by side or top and bottom or tiled
Continous or page mode

Tools
Transpose, Concert Pitch etc.

Plugins (this could even go under Tools)

Help

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• Jan 4, 2015 - 21:27

This makes reasonable sense to this Mac user, and I don't see any reason why it shouldn't make sense to users of all the different operating systems. I especially agree that the Layout and Style menus should be combined into a Format menu.

But now you've got me really thinking. So the Note menu should be spit between an Add/Insert menu and a Tools menu? Then what else goes under the Tools menu? Why not put "Mixer," "Play Panel" and the rest over there?

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• Jan 4, 2015 - 21:59

Hi everyone, best regards for a wonderful New Year and thanks for this great product.

Re: "When switching PageView <-> ContinuousView the score is actually reformatted for the new view. Doing this the actual score is changed and manual tweaking for some elements can get lost. To go back you have to Undo the switch."

I find this very problematic, and I guess is related to how objects are associated(?).

In an ideal situation, an adjustment or placement would only be made once, and a relationship would be established so that appearance in any "view" would be proportional and "correct".

As it is, since there is a quite large amount of tweaking and/or replacing necessary, I find it quite obstructive to creative flow.

I expect this is related to the way sometimes when a file is saved and re-opened, elements are moved (Staff text, Signs, etc.) or why Parts that are extracted display this.

I suspect it must be some difficult code problem or I would assume that this would have been solved a long time ago.

Regards,

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• Jan 5, 2015 - 01:52

It's pretty much impossible for manual adjustments made in page mode to always look "correct" in view mode. Just consider - if you add a marking to one system, then drag it upward to appear as if it was part of the previous system, there is just no way that's going to look right in continuous mode, since there is no "previous system", and the measure that was directly above is actually way to the left. Or, what if you put in a manual line break to force only one measure on a system, then drag items around horizontally to line up with different beats than they are actually attached to. In continuous view, those adjustments won't be correct, because the measure won't be nearly as wide. These are obviously contrived examples, but the point is, no, it's not really reasonable to expect all manual adjustments to look exactly the same in page and continuous view. It's going to look different; the only question is one of specifics and degree. I think it's best to think of continuous view as being for note and symbol entry only, but manual adjustments should be done in page view.

WHat you say about "sometimes when a file is saved an re-open, elements are moved" - that shouldn't happen. If you are seeing this in a current 2.0 build, please file a separate bug report with sample score and steps to reproduce. Parts are another matter. Again, it's completely unavoidable that manual adjustments made in a score won't make sense in the part, since measures will be of different sizes and different locations.

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• Jan 5, 2015 - 16:00

Of course, you're right , and I never would have expected manually adjusted elements to be placed similarly in Continuous View. The real question is, when you switch back to Page View, are the manual adjustments restored? I understood Werner to be saying that when you switch to Continuous View, the score forgets where you used to have placed things.

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• Jan 5, 2015 - 17:08

Try it out! The answer seems to be, no these adjustment are not "forgotten" - they just might not make sense any more in the new view. When you return to the original view, they should still be right where you put them, according to my understanding. If you find a case where this isn't true, I'd consider it a bug, so you should file it with sample score / steps to reproduce.

I could see issues if you made a manual adjsutment in one view, then tried to make *further* adjustments in the other view.

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• Jan 5, 2015 - 17:47

Well, then what was all the fuss about? Werner said "Doing this the actual score is changed and manual tweaking for some elements can get lost. To go back you have to Undo the switch." Certainly I should have checked for myself, but I thought I had just been told something significant from a very authoritative source.

If this is the case, then, I see no reason not to put "Page View" and "Continuous View" under the View menu… which is what I started out by saying.

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• Jan 5, 2015 - 18:11

I believe the point is, a change to Continuous mode *is* a change to your score. Tons of things have to be altered internally to get it render in a single system. These are all things that are reversible, but nonetheless, the state of your score is different now. And this is an undoable operation. So if you make a change to your score, change mode from page to continuous, then make another changes to your score, then the Undo command will undo those changes in that (reverse) order. There would be no way to undo the first and last change without also undoing the change of mode. This was a change made a month or two ago, when it was realized that all sorts of problems were resulting from trying to undo operations performed in a different view than they were made in. In order for Undo to work correctly, the score has to be in the same mode it was in when the operation you are undoing was originally performed.

Anyhow, the bottom line is that the usual guidelines for GUI design say that nothing in a View menu should ever alter your document in any way, and changing View *does* alter it, so it's not technically correct to put it there. Whether anyone would complain or not is another matter, but I can see the reason for saying that it doesn't actually belong.

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• Mar 8, 2015 - 22:52

FWIW, to me, "mode" implies something about what set of actions are possible, not just what things look like. The exact same commands are available in both page & continuous; just the appearance is different. So I agree with leaving it as "View". Although I do understand the desite *something* to capture about the fact that the change of view really does change your score. It's kind of a unique function, really - I can't think of any obvious analogues in other software. That is, sure, the ability to change views is common enough, but having this change affect the thing being viewed - hmm, sounds rather Heisenbergian :-)

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