Add option to make all bars the same fixed width

[fheyen]

Being able to simply set a fixed width for all bars would bring multiple advantages:

• You can enforce a layout that you know will work (but you might have to check/try for each file)
• The same bar should always look the same, as it's look will not depend on how far it is stretched due to neighboring bars
• On a page or endless layout, bars will align, making it easier to see repeating patterns
• (My use case:) Rendering multiple tab versions below each other makes it impossible to get bars aligned
• Maybe faster layouting (although performance is more than good enough for me)

Obviously, this would not look well with all tabs, but sometimes you know enough about it to choose a reasonable width, that might even work better than any automatic approach.

I imagine this to be easy to implement, so please consider it even if it does not seem to you that it brings much benefit.

[Danielku15]

This should be indeed fairly simple to implement in its basics and it has some reasonable use cases.

I am just thinking if it would even make sense to not just set 1 width, but allow a more flexible adjustment of the music sheet. Applications like Guitar Pro and MuseScore allow a range of customizations where you can size each bar individually and even force line breaks at certain measures.

The sizes then stored in files are unfortunately often specific to the software to really work out nicely but having such a feature in alphaTab sounds nice and maybe there is at least some ratio that we could apply to translate the sizes of Software X to alphaTab.

So for me it could be following changes:

1. Extend the data model to hold hints like sizes (GP8 seem to have this on bar and even on beat level 😮) and force/prevent line breaks.
2. Load the information from file formats like Guitar Pro.
3. Add a setting which allows controlling whether alphaTab should try to respect those settings (false by default).

Side Note: It should be possible to change those values quasi on-the-fly and request re-layout and painting to allow users in the UI to change values.

For your concrete use cases you could then subscribe to the scoreLoaded event and simply fill those size hints with your fixed width for all bars according to your preference.

[goodgame365]

I have noticed that when there is only one audio track, this feature works fine. However, if there are two or more audio tracks, the layout display becomes disorganized.

[Danielku15]

@fheyen The feature is available in 1.3.0-alpha.671

https://next.alphatab.net/docs/reference/settings/display/systemslayoutmode/

You would be interested into the horizontal layout + displayWidth combination. As described before you could hook into the scoreLoaded event and set the displayWidth for all your bars as preferered.