Negative staff spacer

• Apr 6, 2015 - 03:04

MuseScore's "Breaks & Spacers" palette hasn't changed from 1.3 to 2.0, and it's got some tools that are indubitably impossible to do without. But I feel there's one thing missing that I would really like to see (I would switch to using a nightly build as soon as it was added): a negative staff spacer.

How the regular staff spacer is used: Drag either the "up" or "down" version onto a measure. It attaches to the top or bottom of the staff. Drag the free end of it, which has an arrow pointing outwards, to make a wider space above or below the staff.

How the negative staff spacer would be used: Drag either the "up" or "down" version onto a measure. It attaches to the top or bottom of the staff, stretched to fill the space between the staff it's attached to and the next one. Drag the free end of it, which has an arrow pointing inwards, to pull the next staff closer together with the one it's attached to.

Why this is needed: When you have a score with a single very tall system filling up the whole page, and at one point you need to make more space between two staves, then the system becomes too tall. What you need to be able to do is then pull a couple other staves together, so the whole thing fits.

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• Jun 19, 2015 - 15:33

I've recently been pondering the whole issue of staff spacers and it occurred to me that the whole thing may be unnecessarily complicated: wouldn't it be easier simply to have a marker at the beginning of each staff, which could be moved horizontally and vertically, either by using the mouse or incrementally by the arrow keys? This would enable spacing to be changed both between staffs AND between systems, allowing total flexibility and preventing an awful lot of faffing about.

You could even change the layout of a page like this and use it to set the default for the rest of the pages in the document or even for other new documents.

If this idea gets good feedback, I'll think about putting it up as a feature request.

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• Jun 19, 2015 - 15:47

The complication is thinking about what happens if/when the layout changes so that the same measures aren't on the same systems any more. It's the same complication that exists, btw, with the thought of having "per page" settings - does it really make sense to have specific settings for page 6 if a subsequent change results in measures that were formerly on page 6 being moved to page 7? Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

The current system has the advantage of tying the spacer to the *reason* for its existence. So, if you need more space between two staves in a particular system because one particular marking in one particular measure extends far below the staff, you can attach the spacer to that measure. Then, the extra space follows that marking around as you would hope.

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• Jun 19, 2015 - 16:32

I don't quite understand the comment about needing less space because of a spacer - if you've attached a spacer then decide you need less space, simply reduce the size of the spacer, no? Or maybe you mean, you've added space between two staves or two system and now things don't fit on the page so you wish to tighten things up elsewhere?

Anyhow, my commnt was not meant to diminish the usefulness of a negative spacer. Just musing about why attaching spacers - positive or negative - to specific *measures* is better in general than trying to have a control based on systems in an abstract sense, since systems are dynamic. We do this currently for initial barlines and bracket position, so it's not completely without precedent, but still, it seems the real life use cases that tend to necessitate mucking about with vertical spacing are almost always based on the specific measure rather than some arbitrary notion of "the fourth system on the page, regardless of what measures happen to be on that system".

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• Sep 22, 2015 - 03:14

note: while it is not possible to drag the spacer to be negative, it is possible instead to edit the spacer in inspector and change "height" to a negative value. But, setting negative values in inspector doesn't change layout currently, although it does change the direction of the the line and the direction of the arrow

I think instead of making a new element for an uncommon use case, I would suggest instead to reuse the up/down spacers, but just allow them to specify a negative value, and change the direction of the line and arrow just like mscore already does after I set a negative value:

negative_up_spacer.png

But setting a negative value currently doesn't do anything to layout.

For the record, I will state that I don't like the concept of negative "heights" or even negative "space", so I would want to change that word in inspector to something that has better physical meaning such as "displacement", such that:

  1. an up-spacer with positive displacement > threshold would increase space above
  2. an up-spacer with positive displacement <= threshold would do nothing
  3. an up-spacer with negative displacement would decrease space above
  4. a down-spacer with positive displacement > threshold would increase space below
  5. a down-spacer with positive displacement <= threshold would do nothing
  6. a down-spacer with negative displacement would decrease space below

(where "threshold" is min system distance for systems, staff distance for staffs or grand staff distance for grand staffs).

(Note that VBoxes are currently able to represent negative "height" and HBoxes are able to represent negative "width"...again I really don't like that terminology of negative "height" & "width", and I would rather make a feature request to just prevent the VBoxes and HBoxes objects to have negative "height" or "width", and then if they really wanted to they could add a spacer with negative displacement instead...but I suppose that is a separate issue)

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• Sep 22, 2015 - 07:43

oh, ok. Admitidally I have used negative height for the VBox that is my title to quickly push my title into the margin to make space. Which is really a negative "displacement".

But what about HBoxes...what could be the use in negative width for HBoxes? I've just foud one use case, and that is to pull the start of a system to the left of the margin. But again, that behavior is a negative "displacement".

I suppose can keep behavior as is. My quip was really that I don't consider "negative" "widths" or "height" to have meaning. I can understand the meaning of negative "displacement", which is essentially what the behavior is of these negative heights/widths boxes. So I suppose what I instead would request that the property name in the inspector be changed to "displacement".

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