At 11:33 PM 07/12/02, Johannes Gebauer wrote: >I am drafting a wish list to be send to Coda very soon. Perhaps some of you >will have additions? Please keep it realistic, though, I don't think wishes >that require a complete rework of Finale will have much chance anyway.
EXPRESSIONS The autoplacement of expressions is at the top of my list, however they implement it, including the ability to specify staff list or "this staff only". I've already discussed this ad nauseam in the other thread. SPEEDY Another high priority which is surely easy to fix would be to get rid of that irritating new feature in Speedy whereby when the staff gets pushed up or down due to going into the ledger lines, it stays up there and doesn't come back. It seems to me that pretty much everyone hates this. The old Speedy behavior was much better. Another change in Speedy behavior I dislike is that typing a number adds a note to the chord if the time value already matches the number typed. Again, the old way was better. Can I at least have a check-off option to turn this off? LYRICS Since my work is overwhelmingly with vocal music (and because my primary identity is as a singer, coach, and choral director, and we tend to care about lyric appearance more than some engravers and most composers do), a great many of my wishes involve lyrics. Lyric spacing is much much better than it was in the pre-2k days, but it still has room for improvement. I DON'T expect it to get everything right. Frankly, I think that ideal lyric spacing depends too much on context-dependent judgment calls that don't easily break down into algorithmic patterns, so the pursuit of "perfect" lyric spacing is a fool's errand. Still, there are things -- some large, some small -- that many things that could bring it close. If a major rethink of the spacing algorithm is in order, it ought to include having lyrics calculate collisions only with other lyrics. This would solve a lot of problems. For starters, it could eliminate the problem whereby the first note of a melisma gets a lot of space and the others don't. It also would get rid of those unnecessary gaps where Finale thinks a long syllable is "colliding" with, say, an accident on the following note, even though there is plenty of room for the lyric to be under the accidental, "overlapping" with it in a horizontal sense but being far away vertically. To some extent, this is a larger problem of spacing in general; I occasionally have other instances where Finale thinks two elements are colliding because their horizontal positions overlap, when actually they don't touch vertically. Maybe that's a can of worms Coda isn't ready to reopen. But it's much more common on lyrics, so maybe it's possible to have an option that is lyric-specific. This should probably be something that can be set in the Music Spacing Options, so that if a particular passage comes out looking bad, I can change the spacing options and try again. - The one remaining major flaw in lyrics which I think is long overdue for a fix, is that syllable-dividing behavior of the hyphen is tied absolutely to the hyphen character itself. It should be possible to choose any character to act as a "hyphen", but Finale forces me to use a hyphen and only a hyphen. If I want to mimic a Ricordi score and use the underline character as my syllable divider, I'm out of luck. If I want to mimic certain German scores which use an equals sign for a hyphen which represents a hard hyphen in the word, I'm out of luck. If I want to use a type font which happens to have the hyphen in an ASCII position other than 45 (as once happened to me with an IPA font I wanted to use), I am desperately out of luck and may as well give up on using that font altogether. The same thing applies in reverse. There are times when I want to print a hyphen in a lyric and have it NOT separate the syllables. I believe the manual actually suggests using opt-hyphen in such a case, but that's just bad typography, because in most fonts opt-hyphen comes out as an en-dash, which looks very different from a hyphen. One possibility, I suppose, would be to somewhere have a document option which lists which ASCII characters will behave as hyphens in lyrics. By default it could be just the hyphen, but I can go in and add or subtract characters to the list to suit my needs. Another option would be to have an escape character that means "treat the following character as a hyphen", or "treat the following character NOT as a hyphen". This is slightly more tedious if I need to use it consistently on a certain character but it does give me all the flexibility I need, so I would be content with that. The same could be applied to the space. Personally, I've never had trouble with the space, but I know there are some fonts in which an opt-space is not the same width as a regular space, so I see the possibility for trouble there. - It would be nice if something could be done to improve the centering of punctuated syllables where mathematical centering does not equal aesthetic centering. I'm not sure what's the best answer to this, but I'd like it if I had a little table where I can make a list of characters and values to say "if a syllable ends with [character], place it [x EVPUs] offset from center". Someone could write a plug-in to do the same thing, I suppose, but then that's one more plug-in I have to run on every piece. I routinely nudge any syllable ending with a comma or period 9 EVPUs to the right. I want to set that in my templates' document settings and never have to worry about it ever again. There may be an occasional exception, but I'd rather have them all adjust and then nudge back if necessary. - I'd like the tracking feature to work properly in lyrics. In my version (Fin Mac 2k2) it can be applied in the Edit Lyrics window, but it has no effect on the document. It would give me the ability to spot-kern lyrics where needed. What would really be great is if tracking were available in expressions, but I assume there's a technical reason why text attributes can't be given to expressions, otherwise they would have let us have all the other ones (font, size, italic, etc) in expressions long ago. - Another awkward thing that comes up frequently is that uncomfortable distance where the syllables are too close for a hyphen but still too far to go without. I'm not sure there's a good algorithmic answer to this. Sometimes I nudge the syllables in or out, sometimes I tweak the spacing of the bar. But one thing that would help a little would be if I could access the value that says how close two syllables need to be before the hyphen goes away. That value must exist somewhere, so how hard would it be to put it in an options menu somewhere where I can change it? In my work I find I would prefer it to be slightly larger. (Probably different values are ideal for different typefaces.) - I would VERY much like to be able to have half-point increments for type size for lyrics. One of my main templates makes use of 10.5-point text for lyrics, which I get by setting the lyric size to 14pt and applying 75% reduction to the page. I've experimented with both 10pt and 11pt (and in fact I do use 10pt in another of my templates), but I find that I really do prefer 10.5 pt. For the most part I can keep doing what I'm doing, but the problem is that I'm stuck with setting the typesize in non "fixed" mode. 95% of the time, that's fine, but if I should ever need to attach a lyric to a reduced note (for a cadenza, eg) I suddenly have a problem that I need to kludge my way out of. If I could just pick 10.5 pt fixed for my lyric size, then that solves everything. WORD EXTENSIONS - Here's one that others have mentioned on the group before. I'd like word extensions to behave something like smart slurs. That is, I want to drag it right and have it lock to a certain note. The word extension then knows to end lined up with that note, and it will adjust as the note's position adjusts. Since a word extension is almost always going to be associated with some later note in the vocal part, this is much more logical than the open-ended horizontal drag we have now. (And if you do want one unattached to a note, the old way still exists.) Probably there should be a setting to let the user define the exact horizontal offset relative to the note, sort of like we have for endpoint position on slurs or ties. This one, at least, should look good in the brochure, since "smart word extensions" can be made to sound sexy in a way that, say, "use non-hyphens as hyphens" can't. Also, something ought to be done about that kludgy fix for word extensions that cross a system break. The business with the option-space makes the lines start too far to the right, and you have to be sure to not apply word extensions until after layout is complete or you might have to redo them when a system break changes. (And heaven help you if you start deleting or shifting syllables past that invisible opt-space and make all your lyrics go haywire.) A smart word extension ought to know how to cross the system break intelligently. TIES - I don't know how much priority Coda gives to engraver-intensive stuff that will barely be noticed by ordinary users, but I'd appreciate it a lot if they'd make the Tie Options even more flexible. I feel a little churlish complaining about this, since they are are *so* much better than before (thanks, guys), but it still irks me that my preferred tie style cannot be programmed. The problem is that "use outer placement" is an all or nothing affair. If I've got a chord with all the notes tied, I want the ties to be parallel; I don't want to see three different horizontal positionings, which is what I get with outer placement turned on. However, if I turn outer placement off, then it's turned off for the entire document, and now I can't have outer placement on ties between single notes, where I surely do want it. In brief, I want the ability to specify "if any tie in the chord has to be inner, then make all of them inner; otherwise, use outer ties." What adaptations they need to make to the Tie Options menu, I don't care, so long as it gives me the ability to specify that rule. LIBRARIES - I'd appreciate it if the Document Options library could be broken down, so that it isn't an all-or-nothing affair. There's such a huge amount of settings included in this one library. Maybe I want to save my tie options and music options to copy into another document, but I don't want to overwrite all the other document settings in the process. I'd like to have a check-off menu to let me choose the ones I want to impose when loading the library and the ones to leave alone. This same concept can run in the other direction. Right now, if I choose "Save Library", I get a choice of 18 different library types I could save. It would be nice if this same menu let me choose any number of these options instead of just one, so that whichever ones I chose would be bundled into a single library of my design. So I could perhaps load a library of articulations, text expressions, and default fonts all at once. Someone on this list occasionally mentions "cascading" libraries. I'm not sure what that means, but perhaps it's something along the same lines? I also agree with the person who would like the ability to edit libraries directly without actually opening a file to go with them. That would be handy, though it's really not a top priority for me. ARTICULATIONS - Can something be done to solve the problem of bad centering of articulations over whole notes and over rests? Maximally, you could have several different H positions in the articulation design itself, but perhaps that's too overbearing. Minimally, I think we'd get a lot of mileage out of a simple document setting which says "Any articulation put on a [whole note] is initially placed offset [x EVPUs] to the right." Then three more settings where "whole note" changes to "whole or half rest", "quarter rest" and "eighth or smaller rest". I think that would take care of it 99% of the time. Anyway, it only affects initial placement, so if you don't like the result you can go back and nudge it. (And if you change the note value after placing the articulation, you're on your own.) -- Whoops, there I go being verbose again. This really isn't even everything, just the main ones that come to mind. I guess I ought to make up my own list to send to Coda.... mdl _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
