Text Placement and Whole Measure Rest bugs

2009-06-07 01:35 am

This applies to NWC2.exe, version 2.0.4.0 If you are reading this in 2010 or later, much of this may not apply.

Summer Band season is here and I just finished my annual exercise of transposing D-flat piccolo parts for my wife. If I only used NoteWorthy for this purpose, it would have paid for itself several times over.

This year seemed easy. One two page piece: Rhythm of the Winds, a '64 piece by Frank Erickson.

It turned out to be not so easy. The piece had multi-measure rests of 2, 3, 5, 6 and 8 measures and getting them to look right took several hours. Then I realized that the piece really wasn't in C Major, it just lacked a Key signature. Fixing that required repagination and to my dismay, all the carefully formatted multi-measure rests had to be redone. This took nearly as long as it took the first time. I decided to investigate why. The attached file is the result.

In the attached file, Placement.nwc, none of the text preserves width. All the blue lines have the properties: Centered, AtNextNote/Bar. As can be seen from print preview, NWC2 often hasn't a clue as to where this is for a whole measure rest (WMR). All the blue lines should be centered over the whole measure rests, as in measure 8 (m8). A significant bug.

Text formatted: AsStaffSignature causes a host of problems:

If it is not in the first measure after a system break, it shifts the WMR's far to the right and misaligns them with other staves (m4).
If the KeySig is hidden, or not present, it doesn't align with other staves where there is a KeySig (m3).
If there is no Clef or KeySig, it produces a gap before the Clef in other staves (m9).
If a clef is re-introduced, it causes a gap between the Clef and KeySig in other staves (m11).

If barlines don't agree by type, they misalign (m12), or cause WMR's to misalign (m10). This is a small point. Barlines should agree by type, but it is not uncommon to have layers where all the barlines are hidden and undecorated.

A very big point is the width of the measures. When measures consist of a whole measure rest, it seems that NWC2 uses a different method to calculate the width of the first measure after a system break than it uses for subsequent measures. I would expect measures in the same line with identical content to have identical widths (m 5 vs m 6), and measures with less content not to be wider (m7 vs m8). This discrepancy is lessened if there is more content in the line, but still obvious enough to me to require a fix.

Re: Text Placement and Whole Measure Rest bugs

Reply #1 – 2009-06-07 06:10 am

I concur. I haven't explored this phenomena to this extent, but I have found in the past difficulty aligning things in first bars of a system when said bar contains a whole rest.

As these charts have been for my own consumption I hadn't pursued it but Rick is correct. These anomalies do need to be addressed.

Re: Text Placement and Whole Measure Rest bugs

Reply #2 – 2009-07-22 05:34 pm

Quote from: Rick G. – 2009-06-07 01:35 am

In the attached file, Placement.nwc, none of the text preserves width. All the blue lines have the properties: Centered, AtNextNote/Bar. As can be seen from print preview, NWC2 often hasn't a clue as to where this is for a whole measure rest (WMR). All the blue lines should be centered over the whole measure rests, as in measure 8 (m8). A significant bug.

And a longstanding bug at that:

Quote from: Paul – 1998-07-10 04:00 am

I haven't had problems centering fermatas over notes, but I have had problems getting them to center over a whole rest. It looks OK on the staff editor, but it is off on the printout.