musescore
Instrument descriptions get cut off in New Score dialog
Issue type
UI bug (incorrect info or interface appearance)
Description with steps to reproduce
When an instrument description is too long to fit on one line it gets cut off.
- File > New > Choose instruments (or press I in an existing score).
- Search for "Violone" and click on it.
Current behaviour: The description gets cut off at the end of the line.
Expected behaviour: It should go onto a second line (or employ one of the animation techniques discussed below).
Supporting files, videos and screenshots
What is the latest version of MuseScore Studio where this issue is present?
Latest nightly master
Regression
Yes, this used to work in a previous version of MuseScore 4.x
Operating system
Windows 11
Additional context
In the original design for the Instruments dialog, instrument descriptions were allowed to go onto a second line. I'm pretty sure that worked when it was first implemented, hence this is a regression.
Sometimes a second line might not be enough, either in English or in one of the translations. In this case, the text could be displayed on a single line with a sideways scrolling animation, like a dot matrix display. Alternatively, it could be displayed on multiple lines with a vertical scrolling animation, like movie credits.
If the mouse cursor hovers over the text, the animation would pause, and the user could scroll the text manually with the mouse wheel or touch gestures. If the mouse is cursor is moved away again then the animation would continue.
(If anyone is worried about animations being distracting, it's worth remembering that, for the vast majority of instruments, the description is short enough to fit on one line, so no animation is needed.)
The solution adopted here for instrument descriptions should be re-useable for descriptions of percussion sub-instruments in the new percussion specification.
Checklist
- [x] This report follows the guidelines for reporting bugs and issues
- [x] I have verified that this issue has not been logged before, by searching the issue tracker for similar issues
- [x] I have attached all requested files and information to this report
- [x] I have attempted to identify the root problem as concisely as possible, and have used minimal reproducible examples where possible
Hi, I’m a college student working on contributing to open-source projects for a software engineering course. I'm assuming this issue is still open, would it be okay if I looked into helping with it? Thanks!
@mugolnik Sure!
@bkunda @avvvvve what do you think about the animation suggested above, should we do that, or shall we first just try how it is when we allow the text to use as many lines as necessary?
I don't think we need to jump to build a custom animation just for this case.
From a very quick scan of transifex, it seems pretty rare that the text is ever much longer than the already allotted two lines. See this two-line description of the Bass Clarinet in Finnish (Suomi) for instance, which looks fine:
Three lines would feel cramped though, so could we try this?
If the text will be longer than two lines, truncate it at the end of the second line with "...". Then, when hovering over the text, show a tooltip with the full description, as shown below centered to and beneath the text. We should not ever show this tooltip if the text is not truncated.
I'm not worried about screenreaders here because it seems that the full description is already ready when you're focused on an instrument in the columns above, as in, the description text does not need to be navigated to using the keyboard in order for it to be read.
Thank you for all the clarification, I'm working on this and am aiming to have a fix within the next two days or so.
I also wanted to ask: is there a preferred way I should test, verify, or demonstrate the robustness of the fix (e.g., specific test suites, actions, or guidelines you’d recommend for this project)? I'll check around a bit but just wanted to double check. Thank you!