NoteWorthy Composer Forum

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Graphical additions:
A1. Support for smaller staff size. This includes size reduction of all symbols on the staff, including texts, slurs and ties, dynamics.

Perhaps an acceptable way to approach this is a scaling factor property for staves.

... using spacers [is] extremely tedious, plus it clutters the score appearance in Edit mode. [...] One option would be to replace the current "two choice" system with a slider with perhaps 10 choices. Another option would be to have a "Custom..." submenu, that lets the individual spacing values for each duration be entered. Also, there should be an option to change the spacing in the score, in much the same way that instruments can be change by inserting an instrument object in a staff.

[...] lyrics. Better control over line spacing, font properties like italics, and an easier way to change these values in the middle of the score, using a boundary object or something similar.

Text object placement  ... some sort of "position with offset" option, with a +/- numeric value that lets me put the object right where I want it.

[...] appearance of slurs [...:] cubic Bezier curves.

[...] an easier way to align notes ... Maybe there could also be a way for a layered staff to "see" the notes on the previous staff ...

... and slurs/ties on multiple layered staves.

Because the graphic output of the "big three" notation programs is now dramatically better than NWC's, and because my scores go to a wide variety of places, I have been forced to mostly abandon NWC for Sibelius.

I almost never include lyrics in my Files, mainly because I find that entering them in the separate lyrics window, and then switching back and forth between that and the staff to make sure everything is properly positioned and aligned, is too much hard work. 

The largest concern I have about NWC's graphics is the apparent absence of any anti-aliasing at all, which shows up in the slurs, but even more so in the hairpins and beams. This is a common raster-graphics problem, but the "big three" have solved it, possibly by going to vector graphics - which would require a large-scale rewrite of the code, so I hope there's a better way.

OK, here's an example. The top snippet is NWC; the bottom snippet is Sibelius. Staff metrics are roughly the same. The good news here is that looking closely at the Sibelius example shows pretty clearly that its smoother appearance is the result of anti-aliasing raster graphics instead of using vector graphics, so it should be doable in NWC without a lot of recoding. Sibelius uses a better-looking font (that's easily fixable, of course). The bottom line, here, is that the NWC snippet looks amateurish compared to the Sibelius snippet. That can make a huge difference when sending music to calls for scores.

Just went back to a pdf taken from an NWC score, and you're right, it looks a lot better. I stand corrected. It's still a problem when creating examples, though, where it's easier to do a screen capture than to produce a pdf just to extract a couple of measures.

Screen-shotting, in my humble opinion, is never the way to go for copying around graphics: It introduces all the parameters of your graphics card and selected display resolution, which plainly adds arbitrary information loss.

... I wonder if any of these things are doable without the developer but as plug ins or objects? ...

The only way I can see for NWC to compete is to open up even more, maybe to the point of open-sourcing it, but at least to the point of providing an API to call all actions and modify a score temporarily extensively