Mark

Real estate on the monitor screen is very precious. But when catering for many, a compromise might need to be struck. Where should the compromise lie? Catering for the economical Composer user who only ever uses one staff and might only have two measures to his whole score, because he is only interested to compose a melody line for his door chime, might be a noble thing. But what about the users among us who aspire to be another Beethoven or Wagner. I do not, but I use at least three staves, piano and solo voice and often more.

What I am missing in Composer is the ability to run several instances of Composer and several instances of the editing screen. Photoshop 7 will not permit multiple instances of the program, but permits the display of several image files in the main window. GoldWave permits several instances of the program and several instances of the editing window with common menus and controls in the main window. This is very useful for comparing, copying and pasting while several files are open and displayed.

Coming back to a “one group of staves only” editing window as I have suggested in earlier postings, the available extra space could be very usefully taken up by displaying other scores or any part of the same score including a continuation of the above score linked to the above part.

The changing and automatically adjusted space for a measure is a very important part of Composer and should of course be maintained. A practical solution would be the highlighting of one bar in a group of staves as the point of focus. The space taken up by the bar would change exactly as it does now, to accommodate the editing of symbols. The highlighted focus area could be moved horizontally by the user but not move by itself and possibly sit near the right end of the editing window mostly. What would move horizontally, right to left, is the score itself. This is similar to what you are describing in your posting of March 30, 2006 as something you have considered, where you bump off measures to the left. However, using scroll bars and a narrow horizontal overview window at the bottom of the screen would do away with changing pages of the score.

The overview would basically be a linear window of time and measure numbers, with the positioning of its locator controlled by the editing action above. The editing window would not be linear with time.

Often I like to look at and play back several measures to the left of the editing area. As it is now, I may have to change pages and magnification, searching for the area of focus, to achieve this.

DJ wrote “… but I’ve yet to see an on-screen display layout that is significantly better.”

In reference to the address of David Jacklin as DJ, I have no idea whether there is a protocol on this forum to control how participants should be addressed. I have used “Mark” for (markwa) and the username for another forum user in the past. I might stay with this system currently. Personally I do not mind if I am addressed by my user name “Herbert” or alternatively by my first name “Herbert”.

In reference to the above quote I have to admit that my motivation for putting forward my proposals is entirely selfish. The features of other notation software do not help me, although I think it is always a good idea to know what is done by others and it would be very much worthwhile to compare notation software generally on this forum. I cannot help here, but there may be other users who own several notation editing programs.

My concern is not about the aesthetics of Composer in this instance, but totally about productivity.

I may not be granted all of what I desire of Composer. Nevertheless …

Best wishes,

Herbert