musescore / musescore/MuseScore
Gaps/margins around texts with borders
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- Dominant language
- C++
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Description
Your idea
For text frames with a border around the text, add a customisable gap distance between the border and the other elements that would be used during automatic layout to avoid the text frame border to touch elements surrounding them.

Similar to the CSS box model.
Problem to be solved
MU4 automatic layout capabilities have been highly improved. Nevertheless, when a text frame has a border, it is laid out often too close from other elements leading really dense score :

Which can even lead to confusion.
The workaround is to manually lay out those elements, which is not recommended, because it breaks partially the MU4 automatic layout and must be done and re-done for every part of the score.
Adding gaps will give more air the score while preserving automatic layout capabilities
Prior art
No response
Additional context
See discussion Copy Part Layout
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start by tracing MuseScore's automatic layout handling for text frames with borders, then review the linked Copy Part Layout discussion for related expectations. Done means the layout supports a configurable gap around bordered text frames and preserves that spacing during automatic layout.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- cpp
- Domain
- design, desktop
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 30/100