musescore / musescore/MuseScore

Flat slurs

Open
#21,782 8 comments 5 reactions 3 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

feature request
Dominant language
C++
Stars
15.1k
Forks
3.3k
Avg merge
2d 2h
Merged PRs (30d)
91

Description

Your idea

Add an alternative style for slurs so that they can have a flat top, as shown in the images below.
image
image

Problem to be solved

When spanning very long phrases, the common arc-shaped slurs creates a lot of vertical space, resulting in an unpleasant appearance and a waste of page space.

To illustrate, here are the first few bars of Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit:
image
image
When recreating the score in MuseScore, extra spaces generated by slurs are quite noticeable:
image

Note that adjusting handles is not helpful because when the height of the slur is reduced, its ends will become too flat.
image

Prior art

Lilypond supports custom slur shapes, but actually requires manually specifying every control point of the slur as a Bézier curve. (So it is also possible to create slurs with multiple turning points, but with a lot of effort.)
Dorico has a style setting to "flatten" the slurs.

Additional context

No response

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.

Assessment

This issue has not been assessed yet.

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.