Chord symbols overrides

I’m completing a project where chord symbols had to be formatted in a way that couldn’t be done via Font Styles, resulting in a situation where I essentially had to override all chord symbols. (The Project Default Appearances are a godsend!)

This arose some questions:

— I tried to be tidy at first, but it seems that each override creates its own component. Is this correct? I started getting, say, multiple copies of the roots as components in the Edit Chord Symbol Appearance window (or even of the accidentals, to which I usually applied no changes whatsoever), so many that I just gave up trying to be methodical. How could I go about in the future so that I can point to the very same component?

— Some of these, in addition to the red ribbon indicating an override, also display a bin icon. Why only on some? Are these components that aren’t being used in any override?

— How exactly are chord symbols sorted in the Default Project Appearances? It’s not by root, and, if my memory serves me right, it’s not chronologically either. Is it by the order they appear in the project? Even though my case is absolutely atypical, could I bug you for an eventual way to control how these are sorted?

  1. Each override does indeed create its own component. This is by design, to ensure that an override really is an override for a single chord symbol. This stuff was already complicated enough that we wanted to avoid trying to put in a secondary level of rule-based selection of components, and obviously we hoped that in general we had provided sufficient customisation in the Engraving Options.

  2. You can indeed only delete components that are not currently in use by any chord symbols in the project.

  3. The chord symbols are indeed ordered according to their rhythmic position in the project in the Project Default Chord Symbol Appearances dialog.

Well, good to see that I understood everything by context.

I imagined that extra abstraction layer might have existed because it seemed in line with your thinking throughout the rest of the software, and because it would allow bulletproof consistency. Things just got crowded on a whole book while doing what I had to do, which led me to wonder if I was proceeding correctly. But I totally understand that it is mostly unnecessary in practical terms, and that this case was rather atypical.