Suggestions for layouts and scores

[rpatters1]

I have been working on an mnx export program for Finale musx files. (I am not affiliated with MakeMusic but had a long and productive relationship with them as a third party plugin developer.) In order to make progress, I tackled the easiest part first: layouts and scores. (I haven't begun to export measures.)

Anyway, it all appears to be working quite well, but I ran into the following issues that I think need to be addressed or at least thought about. These comments are based on the online reference manual as it exists at the time I write them.

• There should be more symbol styles for a group "symbol" property beyond brace and bracket. At the very least, we should add deskBracket. This would allow for describing the Rite of Spring layouts, which is one of my benchmarks for a serious notation program. (That is, a program I would personally consider adopting.) A desk bracket is a thin vertical line with thin-line horizontal hooks at the top and bottom that connect to the top line of the top staff and the bottom line of the bottom staff.
• The staff object has a "labelref" property but no "part" property. That seems like an omission, since it can't rely on the staff source objects all coming from the same part.
• Staff group objects should also have an optional "labelref" property (and an optional "part" that it references).
• "labelref" values would appear to be limited to name and shortName, but these are not enforced by the schema.
• I would like to see another option for "labelref": automatic. This would automatically choose the name or the shortName according to the algorithm of the music program consuming the mnx file. Normally the first system would get the name value and all the rest would get the shortName value. This would allow the same layout to be used on multiple/all systems.
• I question whether "systems" should be a required property of the page object. Scores may have blank pages. (That is, pages that contain no music.) I realize one can create an empty systems array, but that doesn't capture the fact that the page is blank as well as having no systems array at all does.

[rpatters1]

To comment further, it almost seems like "labelref" should be an object with 2 required properties: "part" and "ref" which could be "name", "shortName", or "automatic".