[Denemo-devel] [bug #36938] Gui Problems with Score Layout

[John Beattie]

URL:
  <http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?36938>

                 Summary: Gui Problems with Score Layout
                 Project: Denemo
            Submitted by: jabeattie
            Submitted on: Tue 24 Jul 2012 14:35:11 GMT
                Category: None
                Severity: 3 - Normal
              Item Group: None
                  Status: None
                 Privacy: Public
             Assigned to: None
             Open/Closed: Open
         Discussion Lock: Any

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Details:

Using 0.9.5 rc2 on Windows

I am going to break the golden rule and use 1 bug to record what could be
multiple problems.
They are all cosmetic problems with Score Layout.
They can all be postponed to a later release.
They will probably be fixed at the same time  - one way or another.

1) My first impressions of Score Layout was "I shouldn't be here!".  If that
is my impression, what would a non-technical user think? This new feature has
the potential to move the user further away from raw Lilypond. You need to
make the user want to use this feature. I am not a GUI expert so I can't tell
you what to do to achieve this. I can just say it looks wrong and that is more
that just the normal case of everybody thinking that the gui should be
different (that part follows!).

2) For each staff, you have a graphic showing the clef used in the denemo
score. However if you change the clef in the score, it doesn't change in the
Score Layout. So you can have different layouts telling different things about
the common score. They do change eventually but it might take shut down and
restart of denemo.

3) Still on the clef graphic. This is shown as a button. You can press it and
nothing happens. I can't think what you could do with such a button so if it
is just for information, it shouldn't be a button.

4) When you open up voices the buttons for the Music for voice do not line up.
The 1st or only voice is to the right due to the Initial Signatures. The
second voice is to the left underneath the Initial Signatures.

5) When you open the Initial Signature, the height of the button for Music for
Voice 1 increases. That doesn't look right. A similar thing happens with the
graphic for clef, the 2 arrows and the various X boxes but it doesn't look as
bad for them. Perhaps fixing 4) will also fix 5).

6)There is something about the X boxes that doesn't look right - yet they do
exactly what you would expect them to do so I have no idea what it is that I
don't like!

7) Personally I don't mind writing bits of Lilypond. I can & do add scripts
and insert directive manually. I don't even mind that I am specifying notes in
what I believe is the Dutch notation i.e. bes for b flat. However I am not, or
at least should not, be your target user. I am (was) a programmer and a
musician (as I expect most of the development team are). The target user
should just be a musician whose technical knowledge stops at the point where
they load the application. In other words you have to hide the Lilypond syntax
as far as possible. The problem with that is the more you hide it, the more
you loose of Lilypond's flexibility. I could say that when editing e.g. the
composer, the user should only type in the name but I sometimes want /bold or
even /column etc. Perhaps you could scan the user's input, if it is just
ordinary letter, wrap it in quotes and put the <keyword> =  in front of it. If
it contains back slashes then wrap in braces and put <keyword> = \markup  in
front. 
If you you look at print transpose, you have a way to specify the 
transposition where the user only needs to know how to specify the interval.
Within Score Layout, the user is expected to edit the start of the Staff
block.






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