Phantom symbols

[RickyChitarrone]

Doubles—phantoms, Doppelgänger—of symbols appear in the score other than where I place them.

I am using Evolution 3.7.0.9232793350 - b756ccd in macOS 13.3, Mac Mini M1 2020, 16 GB memory to work on this file. I have not edited this in earlier versions of Evolution so am unaware of whether this is new or persistent.

I notice two kinds of doubles: A) ones I can click/select and B) others I can’t click on. Both appear on page 6 in the Primo book of the attached score, for instance. I have been using the mensuralRestLongaImperfecta symbol as a vertical alignment glyph for a baroque lute tablature project. I enter these mainly by copy-and-paste once I’ve got the first one aligned correctly.

A) Of the sort that I can select/highlight, dotted attachment lines will appear when I attempt to drag the ghost character. The lines show which symbol in the score it’s doubling. Deleting the phantoms won’t also remove the source symbol as placed on the staff. ⌥ → from the upper tablature letter will only bring me to other glyphs on the staff, never to the double elsewhere on the page. I have left one of these in place above the “Presto” tempo marking. These appear when I print to PDF.

B) Of the sort I can’t select, these disappear if I zoom in close enough and reappear when I zoom out, with their positions unchanged from where I first saw them. For instance, if you zoom out on p.6, these will appear in measures 5 and 6 close to the symbols I’d actually placed there. If you zoom in, they will blink off. They don’t appear when I export a PDF.

You can preview these behaviors in the attached MP4: you'll observe that the vertical lines in the last bar of the first system blink out when I zoom in on them. (This one is mensuralProlationCombiningStroke, but the behavior is identical to what I described above.) You can observe this and the rest of the described behavior in the attached mscz file.

As an extra observation, sometimes nothing will paste after pasting fine elsewhere, and I will need to re-copy, sometimes several, times before it finally appears. I began suspecting that this unsuccessful paste operation is when the phantom characters get generated. But when I tried Undo (⌘ Z), only edits I intended to make get undone, never a phantom character that I’m aware of.

In case it's useful, the provenance of this file is a bit drawn out. I believe my colleague derived the tablature from an MXL file of staff notation that I created in Sibelius 7.5. He used the current release of MS 4x to make the unformatted tablature. Evolution wouldn’t open it directly (not what I’m reporting on!), so I opened it first in 4.3.1 (241490902) and saved it on my end before working in Evolution.

I look forward to hearing what you make of this mystery. Thank you very much.

Archive.zip

[worldwideweary]

FWIW, on my linux system there is no invisibility of the vertical line symbols within the staff. However, the other symbols above the staff seem to have problems when scrolling, yet are re-drawn while zooming is performed:

capture.webm

Looks like the vertical line does go undrawn when the other symbols also go undrawn (below between staves in the included video)... seems to only apply to "non-selectable" elements (can't select the lower vertical line or the other symbols in my 3.7 build)

[Jojo-Schmitz]

Some of these symbols seem to have gotten dragged off page, that'd explain why they are not selectable (i.e.: that is a known and long standing bug). They should become selectable in continuous view, then reset their positions (Ctrl+R)

[RickyChitarrone]

Thanks for the tip about using continuous view to clean up the artifacts. It works and is helpful.

In the interest of knowing that we're understanding one another the same, a quick response from me to Jojo's most recent, I never dragged any of these outside of where I wanted them to be. Rather they got placed there by the software when I attempted to paste in a pre-aligned stroke. I was unaware of how many of these had jumped out to transneptunian orbits until I saw it in continuous view!

[Jojo-Schmitz]

Objections to closing this issue?

[RickyChitarrone]

Is this issue solved in a subsequent release of Evolution? If yes, by all means, close this. Thanks!

[Jojo-Schmitz]

Not, as there IMHO isn't any issue

[RickyChitarrone]

The issue is very much present, unless, by your response, needing to enter horizontal continuous mode and scroll the entire part to track the stray flags that are unselectable/unclickable in page view doesn't rise to the level of an issue.

[Jojo-Schmitz]

The ability to place elements outside of page borders and then being unable to select them in page mode is known and dealt with elsewhere on the upstream repository. Or at least should.
If and when it gets fixed there, I'll look into backporting it to 3.x

[RickyChitarrone]

Hi Jojo, and thanks for your quick reply. Just so we're clear, however, do you understand that the issue as I'm reporting it isn't one of my placing objects outside the page borders. Rather it's one of the software randomly pasting my object other than where I indicated when I select a tablature letter then attempt to paste a symbol that's already in my cut-and-paste buffer. When I give the "paste" command and nothing shows up, I know that there will be a stray object that I might or not be able to see far away from what I was attaching it to. The "undo" command merely does not recognize that instance of pasting, and instead undoes whatever legitimate operation preceded it.

[Jojo-Schmitz]

Ok, maybe I misunderstood the issue

[Jojo-Schmitz]

Will have another look when back from vacation, mid August

[RickyChitarrone]

Een ontspannen vakantie!

[Jojo-Schmitz]

You're Dutch?

[RickyChitarrone]

I’m not Dutch, but I can understand some, but mainly I noticed a screenshot you’d posted was from an OS set to Dutch.

[Jojo-Schmitz]

I don't think so, I'm German and most likely the screenshot was too 😉

[RickyChitarrone]

I saw the Dutch screenshot on a page that I thought you had authored, here. Sorry for the incorrect conclusion.

Sowieso, Deutsch ist eine Sprache, die ich ok lese, schreibe und spreche, und, außerdem, anerkennen kann. Ich wünsche Dir einen guten, restaurativen Urlaub. Bis später!