musescore / musescore/MuseScore

Allow Bracket Thickness to modify Square Brackets

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feature request
Dominant language
C++
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Merged PRs (30d)
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Description

Your idea

There's currently a small gap in features around brackets. MuseScore offers the most commonly-used bracket types (winged, curly, square, and floating), but Bracket thickness under Format>Style>System excludes square brackets. Either adding a new bracket to the palette, allowing the Style dialog to modify square brackets, or allowing brackets to stack/share columns would fill this small gap.

Problem to be solved

Older engraving conventions called for square brackets around choral staves, and these brackets were square with a bold line. It is currently impossible to natively create that effect in MuseScore.

Prior art

MuseScore can already draw a bold square bracket by stacking a square bracket and a line, but only when both elements are marked invisible (which disables their automatic placement):
image

Additional context

Examples of scores that uses this style of bracket:
image
image

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by locating the Format > Style > System bracket-thickness setting and the square-bracket rendering or placement code. Compare the existing bracket types and the described invisible square-bracket-plus-line workaround. Done should mean that square brackets can produce the requested bold appearance natively, with the chosen behavior covered by appropriate validation.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
cpp
Domain
desktop
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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