Barline Alignment between system staves

• Apr 26, 2015 - 10:49

For the sake of perfection and for the satisfaction that exact alignment brings I was trying to find a way of aligning the barlines in my latest upload.

Hanon barline Alignment issue - 260415 - 10:30:16.png

If you look at the above you can see that each bar has the same number of notes of equal time value with a Layout stretch set to 1.00 for all bars yet the bar lengths are not equal and are out of sync with other.

Using the Layout stretch I find I cannot get the precise alignment that I aspire to get.

Is there method/workaround to achieve this?

The music is available here


Looks like a slight layout bug to me: it seems cause for the different lengths of the measures is the number of ledger lines needed.
Compare measure 3 and 7, then take a note from voice 2 in measure 3 that is inside staff and move it down, so it needs a ledger line and see how then the barlines do line up

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

I see. So the width of the ledger lines and the number of them is influencing the spacing of each bar.

Had there been accidentals and the score had had to accommodate sharps and flats I assume the idiosyncrasies of the layout formatting of each bar would have been even more evident.

For this piece I could almost do with non-proportional formatting where each note or system object is given the same amount of horizontal space much like a monospaced font provides. I'm not sure this is realistic or how useful this would be to others, although perhaps sometimes being able to switch everything to a "non-proportional" view could help with proofreading.

I imagine if there was a minimum/maximum bar size option one could fiddle the figures until the bars were conforming to a more defined length.

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

Indeed, it's a sort of basic limitation in the layout algorithm that is mostly harmless but every once in a while rears its head.

What we do is calculate the minimum width for each measure, then see how many fit on a system, then stretch everything proportionally to fill the system. Ledger lines and accidentals increase the minimum width for a measure, as they should. Realistically, though, we should have a second "nominal width" figure or some such that does not include the extra space required for these elements (also arpeggios, falls, etc), and another figure that tells us at what point the measure has been stretch enough that we no longer need to worry about the difference.

I'm sure that doens't quite make sense, even to me, but anyhow, it's something I've thought about before but never tried to put into words, so this gives gives me an excuse.

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

Well, it's *correct* that notes with ledger lines take more space if the notes are close together - otherwise the ledger lines may collide. So it is correct that the minimum measure width is greater if there are ledger lines. The "bug" is that this extra space then affects the minimum width of the measure and is then included in the stretch. This could be solved as I suggested above, but it's a pretty significant change to the layout algorithm. Werner *is* considering changes of this magnitude for 2.1 or perhaps later, but I don't know that this specifically is on his list. Like I said, it's mostly harmless - just means some measures might be a few pixels wider then necessary by default.

You can use the Inspector to manually adjust the Horizontal offset of individual elements but only do this after entering all the notes as changes can then mess up your layout again.

FWIW, there was formerly a style option to force this, but it caused problems if some measures would not have been able to fit. It was too easy to shoot yourself in the foot with this option. I'd like to reinstate this - or something similar - if we can figure out a more foolproof way to do it.

But FWIW, normally, the usual principles of music engraving say you are are supposed to go out of your way to *not* line up barlines. It would only be special cases like this where it might conceivably make sense to viuolate those established conventions.

I have come across a minor issue that I assume is caused by the width of the ledger lines
I have been editing Rialto Ripples by Gershwin. I have a small issue with the bar below
Rialto ORIG Ledger Lines Issue from 2015-07-27 12:51:02.png

I get what is seen below - where the RH grace notes have been grouped closely to one another leaving a gap before them.
Rialto Ledger Line Issue  from 2015-07-27 12:52:41.png

I have had to manually shift the grace notes (that have no ledger lines) in the RH using the Horizontal offset option to match the position of the grace notes (that have ledger lines) in the LH
Rialto Ledger Line Issue Horizontal Offset from 2015-07-27 12:54:17.png

In reply to by James Brigham

Yes, this is normal. Sometimes you might happen to want to trry to line such grace notes up, but there is no special reaosn they need to be that I am aware of. In general, there might be different numbers of them, they might also differ in accidentals and thus spacing them the same would look really bad, etc.
