At 12:42 AM 9/19/02 -0800, Mark D. Lew wrote: >OK, but couldn't the same be said about pretty much any feature? Couldn't >you say, for example, that speedy entry is an awkward and counterintuitive >system and the fact that you and I get good results out of it is evidence >only our our flexibility?
Certainly, and there are systems that work that way. But pitches have a much stronger linkage in all directions than words. And I think that what you're looking for is perfectly achievable if text still behaved like text, however the program worked underneath. >In those days (about 1993, I'd guess), Finale was even harder to >learn than it is now, but because it was worth the extra effort to learn >because it could do so much more. I remember. And I was using a PC (you too?) where all that Mac-like behavior (and the requirement for Adobe Type Manager) was pretty frustrating. Let's put aside what work programmers have to do for the moment, and just look at what you want. And perhaps I wasn't clear -- I type lyrics into score because I am trying to avoid all the Finale craziness. It isn't that I wouldn't enjoy the features you request below, it's just that Finale is not trustworthy if I am required to remember everything I've done in order to make sure I don't fall into some sort of invisibility trap (same goes for ownership, and for my regular request for rubber bands to indicate that). >- First and foremost, I like having the Edit Lyrics box. If it behaves like text, then this is its 'natural' state, including the edit features you listed. >- I want to be able to make font changes at a global level. If it behaves like word processing text, you've got that. >Likewise, if I decide that the French text should >be in italic while the English remains non-italic, I want to be able to >change that entire verse all at once, rather than carefully selecting all >the syllables of one line and not the other. The same. >- I want to be able to make adjustments to the baseline on a verse-by-verse >level, again without selecting the syllables individually. If baselines are an independent feature applied to a block of text (just as italics or colors are assigned), you've got it. >- If I want to shift all syllables in a verse to the left or the right, I >want that shift lyrics function to be there. Or individually. There's no reason to lose these features if text is text to start with. Highlight the text you want to shift, and move any word, or some of it, or all of it. >All of these functions are intimately linked to the fact that the computer >recognizes the lyric text as a group of syllables that exist in a certain >order, grouped into verses. It doesn't have to be. That's just the choice that was made, and part of why it's so crazy. Just look at an ordinary word processing document. Everything you ask for is there, including lists and tables and paragraphs and verses and what-have-you. Turn it around. I'm saying that the text is its own entity and the notes, verses, etc., are assigned to *it*, not the other way around. If the computer establishes any table of relationships, set of pointers, or whatever the database-du-jour method is, then to my mind it would retain the text as any text block within Finale. That would allow anything to be called a lyric (and I do that with my special barline technique, using arbitrary barlines as one set of 'lyrics') and have a note/chord/barline/clef assigned to it -- without ever losing the text as an integral and integrated component. >Another thing I encountered in Lime was that if I did anything at all >unusual, it tended to get confused about hyphens and word extensions. If >you're proposing a system where each lyric is a separate note-attached >item, how do you assume the hyphens will be made to work? I'm suggesting each note as a lyric-attached item, not the other way around. The text still has its integrity, and a hyphen is a hyphen. It continues until it finds the next syllable, so to speak. A word extension is like italics or color or font, and it continues until the next word (or the use of some sort of visible control code to end it). >But >what if you have two verses with different scansion, so that a certain note >has a syllable in verse two but not in verse one? The system needs to know >that the verse-two syllable "doesn't count" so the hyphens can be placed to >go through that note for verse one. The problem goes away if the notes are assigned to the lyrics. The lyrics are then contiguous, with information applied to them. There are difficulties in re-thinking the programming that goes this deep, but I don't see a situation that text-as-text doesn't work. With text and lyrics being the same thing, and only having different types of assignments to it, you sweep away the artificially difficult situation that Finale set up years ago. (It would probably mean up-translation of old material to a new Finale format would result in all sorts of indigestion, though.) Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
