Notions de mise en page

MuseScore generally does an excellent job of arranging music and text on the page, but there are situations where you may need to adjust things—to make music larger or smaller, to add space between staves, to change the number of measures on a page, to move text closer to or further away from the staff, etc. In order to make these types of changes, it helps to understand how MuseScore works with respect to page layout.

Definitions

There are a number of terms used throughout this chapter that you will need to be familiar with.

Spatium (plural: Spatia) / Space / Staff Space / sp.

\ La taille de tous les objets (portées, têtes de notes, hampes, altérations, clefs, etc.), sur une partition, repose sur une unité de base appelée « espace de portée » ("staff space" ou "sp") afin d'en garantir les proportions correctes.\ Un sp est défini comme la distance entre le milieu des traits de deux lignes adjacentes d'une portée (ou un quart de la hauteur d'une portée standard à 5 lignes en supposant que l'épaisseur des lignes est nulle).\ Lors de la création d'une nouvelle partition, MuseScore tente initialement d'ajuster automatiquement cette valeur afin que toutes les portées tiennent dans la page.\ Cela aboutit généralement à une valeur de 1.75 mm par sp, soit une hauteur de portée de 7 mm, correcte pour l'essentiel des partitions solistes, musique chorale, petits ensembles et pour le matériel. Les pages de garde et la musique pour enfants peut tirer profit de tailles plus importantes. Les partitions pour grands ensembles nécessitent souvent une plus petite taille afin de faire tenir toutes les parties dans la page.\ Il peut être nécessaire d'ajuster cette valeur ensuite, si le positionnement automatique aboutit à des espaces importants entre les portées pour éviter les collisions.

Modify the definition of "staff space" itself in the "Page settings" window. See Score size and spacing chapter, the overriding options are also explained there.

Staff

You should know the concept of Musescore instrument too.

A staff is the set of lines and spaces on which notes are written. When the term is used in MuseScore, it refers to that set of lines and spaces for a given instrument throughout an entire score. In the following score for voice and piano, everything marked in yellow constitutes a single staff—the staff for the voice:

Grand staff

In music for piano and certain other instruments, two staves are used—one primarily for the right hand, the other for the left. This set of two staves is normally connected by curly braces and is referred to as a grand staff. In the following excerpt, the portion marked in yellow is a grand staff:

System

Like text, music is read left to right, top to bottom. Each line of music read across the page is called a system, and it contains the staves and grand staves for all instruments. In the following example, the yellow highlighted region represents a single system:

Even if a score has only a single staff for a single instrument, we still refer to a line of music read across the page as a system. In the following lead sheet, there is only a single staff but three systems:

Frame

Most text in notated music is associated with specific notes or measures. However, you may also need to place text that is not associated with a specific note or measure—the title at the beginning of a score, lyric verses placed at the end of a score, explanatory information placed between systems or even between measures. MuseScore uses elements called frames for this. There are vertical, text, and horizontal frames—each optimized for a particular type of use. Horizontal frames can also be used to create separation between measures on a system, with or without associated text.

Margin

A margin is an area in which MuseScore will not normally place music or other elements. The page margin is the area around all four edges of the page where no elements are placed. The music margin is the area between the top and bottom margin and the first and last staff. The staves themselves will not be placed in those margins, but notes and other markings above or below the staves may be.