Automatic Staff/System Spacing

[OCTO]

Here is the first result of automatic spacing for condensed scores as described above.

Well, this is truly astonishing.
I will not comment the pure engraving things which can be improved in both original score and your output, rather it is really really interesting to see how the plugin works.
I have read your comments (both here and other forums) about how MM deals with you and other plugin developers, I hope they will take you seriously at least to implement your work into the core. Or to offer you an employment!

After all, you have to leave something for us engravers to work out.

Oh, yes – otherwise no future for this forum!

[jan]

>BTW, two additional aspects which it would be nice if this plug-in could address in condensed situations are hairpin opening width
You mean: slightly reduce opening width in this case?

>and stem length.
And slightly reduce stem length
Two good ideas!

[Knut]

Yes, exactly.

Hairpin openings especially will have a lot of variation from score to score and engraver to engraver, so there should perhaps be a limit to these alterations or an option to disable them entirely. Nevertheless, for these extremely condensed situations, stem lengths and hairpin openings are almost always reduced somewhat, both to keep an even visual balance and avoid collisions.

[jan]

>I have read your comments (both here and other forums) about how MM deals with you and other plugin developers, I hope they will take you seriously at >least to implement your work into the core. Or to offer you an employment!
Well, they know about all my developments (even some that I have not shown to the public yet) for 20 months and are regularly updated.
I have offered them to bring this into the Finale core 20 months ago - they were not interested and haven't changed their minds yet. Or let me say it like this, they were interested "in general", but didn't want to have it coded in C++ which was my condition for working together. Without C++ (as they wanted it) it's not possible to have it in the Finale core, but only as an external JW Lua plugin which of course has several drawbacks over core integration.
The main problem could have been that they would have had to convince to Jari to let me use his C++ Finale framework - which he had offered some time ago, but never implemented. Currently Jari is not available for answers. So until Jari returns, there will probably be no changes to this policy.

[Schonbergian]

Very impressed with the results so far, especially in this "age" of rather loosely spaced music. Still some room for improvement, but your plugin seems to compare favourably with the hand-engraved scores I've seen in that regard.

[OCTO]

Currently Jari is not available for answers

http://www.finalemusic.com/blog/wheres- ... -plug-ins/

[jan]

Here is another test video demonstrating two automatic system/staff spacing algorithms of the Perfect Layout plugin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-V0Xy4E_xYQ
The plugin takes a score with many collisions between staves and respaces the staves within the system.

1.) Minimized: similar to the Don Juan example above, for condensed scores (Video: 0m27s)
2.) Spread: the staves are wide spread to fill the full page (Video: 1m14s)
A third one that I am now working on also includes automatic system scaling ... video coming soon.

Any comments, suggestions, ideas are welcome.

[Knut]

Jan,

The spread version seems to be nicely balanced, but the minimized version doesn't really seem minimized to me. There seems to be a lot more room than necessary between certain staves, and even some collisions in others (although it's difficult to see exactly from the video).

[jan]

One new feature is the automatic violin clef change that allows more condensation on empty staves: Haydn font instead of Maestro (see example score 2 bottom staves).

The dynamic expressions now don't use rectangular boundary boxes anymore, but cut-out boundary boxes as in SMuFL. This allows for a better condensation for example in m.5 piano where the fermata box would otherwise collide with the mp box.

Adding additional clef changes would be another feature that would improve for example m.3 in bassoon 1 (the high note in that measure was only added for demo purposes).

[John Ruggero]

This is a remarkable project. If I used this process as a first step, I would then make the following changes to the output,

1. Reduce the staff height a little and add space between some staves in both examples to produce a less cluttered appearance. Two staves should never be so close together that they begin to merge as happens between the staves of the harp. There must be a formula that connects staff height and acceptable distance between staves.

2. Move all dynamics and hairpins off the staves. For me, this is non-negotiable.

3. Flip the fermata in measure 5 in the piano to get rid of the large white space between the staves of the piano.

4. Center the f in m. 2 of the piano. Centering dynamics for double staffed instruments should be part of the spacing program.

5. Adjust the height of the beams to allow greater space where needed. For example, the acoustic guitar stems are too long and this forces the dynamics too low. I see many other beams that are causing issues.

6. Replace the accents with narrower ones. That would help spacing issues as in m. 3 strings.