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Topic: controlling note placement in chords (Read 4877 times) previous topic - next topic

controlling note placement in chords

I'm currently evaluating NoteWorthy, and I have the following questions about note placement in chords:

1. I create a chord which contains three notes, two of which are a step away from each other. This means that there isn't space for all the heads on the same side of the stem. NWC picks one of the notes and places it on the other side of the stem. Is there any way to control WHICH head gets displaced?
2. In this same chord, one of the notes falls outside the staff, so NWC fills in a ledger line through the note. However, since NWC has placed heads on both sides of the stem, it makes the ledger line twice as wide as it should be. Any way to control this (shorten the ledger line)?
(If these questions aren't clear, I could send a *.NWC file with an example...)

And one more question...

3. Is there any support for ornament or mordent symbols? I'm thinking that I can probably do a user font using music symbols and insert these, but I wondered if there was a nicer way of doing this?

Thanks for any assistance...
-Clint

Re: controlling note placement in chords

Reply #1 –
NWC does not support user control over notehead placement in a chord or ledger line width. The user font facility is the only way to enter symbols/ornaments that are otherwise not natively supported in NWC.

Re: controlling note placement in chords

Reply #2 –
For the past two years I have been asking the same question about noteheads, and nothing has been done to remedy such a simple error. It really makes me despair of NWC when every other package I've seen gets it right.

There should be no need for user intervention, since any book on musical notation (and I've sent a selection to Eric :~() specifies that the lower of the two notes goes to the left of the stem, and the higher to the right ... whichever way the stem goes ... and the head note is always in its correct position , so there should never be any ambiguity.

What's more the chords on two staves should always be aligned on the head notes. NWC always aligns the chords on the left-hand notes, and puts accents and staccato dots on the left hand notes instead of the head notes.

I tear my hair out at each new release which fails to put right what is just plain sloppy.

Re: controlling note placement in chords

Reply #3 –
Regarding note placements, the next release includes some non-trivial fixes in this area (note position from one staff to the next, however, remains unchanged in version 1.51):

Bug Summary: A bug exists in note placement for chord members separated by a semitone
Fixed in: Version 1.51
Availability: by 09 May 1998

Bug Summary: A bug exists in alignment of note attributes (accent, staccato, tenuto) for chords that include members separated by a semitone
Fixed in: Version 1.51
Availability: by 09 May 1998

Details: We are releasing a maintenance upgrade (version 1.51), which includes all of our recent bug fixes, including these. Look for a version 1.51 upgrade to be available on or before 09 May 1998.