At 8:48 AM 09/15/03, Noel Stoutenburg wrote [in part]: > My entire point is this: at present, if I have a finale file containing >a score which is missing a syllable on the 3rd beat of the seventh bar of >the alto >line, whether the syllable is missing because I inadvertantly failed to >include a >separator intended that should have been between the syllables on the >second and >third beat, or because I just plain failed to type it in, if I type the >syllable on >that beat using "type into score", none of the other syllables which occur >after >that syllable in the text block is affected.
Yes, and none of the other syllables are affected when you add the syllable in Edit Lyrics either, IF you add the syllable at the end of the list. If you add it in the middle of the list, then the other syllables are all going to get off-sync because their assignments are keyed off their position in the list. I suppose you could have a function whereby any time you add a syllable to the middle of the Edit Lyrics window, all of the assignments to subsequent lyrics will be incremented accordingly. That would solve the inconsistency you mention, but I'm not sure if it's really helpful. I use Edit Lyrics regularly, and if I add a syllable to the middle of the list it's only because I want all the syllables to move down (ie, if I inadvertently omitted it the first time). > If I find in the text block the exact >same location that the syllable would be in if I typed it using "type into >score", >and type the syllable in using "edit lyrics", I argue that none of the other >syllables should be affected either. But Type in Score deliberately rearranges your lyrics for you as you enter. The whole point of Edit Lyrics is to have control of the data. OK, suppose I'm using Edit Lyrics and I type in, "Row, row your boat gen-tly down the stream, mer-ri-ly, mer-ri-ly, mer-ri-ly, mer-ri-ly, life is but a dream." I then use option-click assignment to put all the syllables in. When it's done, I notice that everything is off-sync because I omitted one "row". So I go back into Edit Lyrics, add the "row" and then click-assign the missing "dream". If it worked your way, when I add the "row", all the syllables would stay put in the wrong place and I'd have to use Shift Lyrics to move them over. >No. And truth to tell, while it is an irritant to me that the results >using type >into score and edit lyrics are different in the ways I have described, I >could live >with the differences if there was a warning in the manual that the two >methods can >give different results. To me, the lack of the warning is the most >irritating thing >of all. Well, I agree with that. The lyrics system needs more safeguards to prevent people from getting unexpected and undesired results. > [...] While it would not provide the option of the hyphen leading a >syllable, this >is a MAC OS problem. If Apple would just give a good way to access a >character by >use of its map value, you, too, could get the "non-breaking" hyphen by >typing in the >equivalent of "ALT-0173" Yes, but that doesn't change the fact that Finale has hard-wired one particular ASCII character and made it unavailable. The one time this problem really bit me in the butt was not with a non-breaking hyphen at all, but because I wanted to use a freeware Cyrillic font that mapped a certain letter onto the usual ASCII slot for hyphen, putting the hyphen elsewhere. This font was simply unusable in Finale, and I was unable to complete the piece on schedule. I have since gotten a better Cyrillic font, but the fact remains that Finale has tied itself to a certain font mapping. There ought to be some sort of indirection to get around it. For that matter, you could blame the lack of non-breaking hyphen not on the Mac OS, but on the font designers. The only reason it works in Windows is because a standard Windows font has a second character which looks identical to a hyphen. Any Mac font could be designed to do the same thing, regardless of what the OS says. >> As we've discussed, the hard hyphen does not work for Mac. > >Well, can't blame MM for this one. Huh? Of course you can blame MM for that! What if the only way you could produce an umlaut vowel in Finale were by typing option-u then the vowel? Anyone using FinWin would be shit out of luck because Windows doesn't have an option key. If that were the case, would you say that Microsoft is to blame? Finale has tied down the character ASCII=45 so that it simply cannot be used in a lyric. It just so happens that most Windows fonts are designed so that the symbol drawn by asc-45 is drawn in identical form at asc-173. Mac fonts don't do that. Are you saying that Mac is flawed because it doesn't behave exactly like Windows? That's a typical Microsoft attitude. Finale's inability to use a hyphen within a syllable is a flaw in the program, for which Windows happens to provide an easy workaround and Mac does not. If Finale were a Windows-only program that would be fine, but MM sells the program for Mac. It should work on a Mac, and it does not. That is MM's fault, not Apple's. >But, I'm curious. On my side, in the edit >lyrics window, under text menu, is "insert symbol", through which option >one has >access to every character in the font. Does this option exist on the MAC >side? If >so, I would suggest obtaining one of the after market font discs >(especially if you >are on OS-X) or coming up with a copy of MS's Times font, and switching to >a font >which defines a non-breaking hyphen that you can insert. I have Microsoft's Times New Roman on my Mac, and I use it with Finale frequently. Microsoft's TNR for Mac does not have a non-breaking hyphen character. Even if it did, I might want to use some other font some day. Should I be restricted only to a small subset of available fonts when I'm using Finale? The problem is not how the font is mapped. The problem is that Finale takes one character out of the set and makes it unavailable. On my old Cyrillic font, it wasn't a hyphen at all, it was some other letter. >I concur with Mark's suggestions for making the edit lyrics box (and since >I suspect >that the edit lyrics box is a process shared with edit text option in the >text tool, >it would be good there, too). And instead of a separate click assignment >function, >maybe a drag-and-drop instead: drag a syllable out of the edit lyrics >window to the >staff to attach it to a note. Yikes. I hope that you really meant to say drag-and-drop *in addition* to click-assign, and not "instead" of it. I would be horrified it click-assignment were taken away, and I most certainly don't want to have to drag syllables into place. This is like Simple vs Speedy. If there are others who like Simple, that's fine with me; just don't ever take Speedy away. >> Yes, but suppose someone who normally uses Type in Score finds himself in a >> situation where he needs to rearrange lyrics en masse and he thinks to go >> into the Edit Lyrics window to fix them and, assuming it can't be too >> counter-intuitive, starts changing some syllables. Then he goes back to >> page view and discovers, to his horror, that he has completely bollixed the >> whole file and can't figure out how to restore it. > >He needs a) to practice safe computing, i.e., always save the file before >doing >something as major as this, and b) to read about Edit > Undo/Redo >lists.... <vbg> Several months ago David Fenton described on this list how a file of his got messed up when he used Edit Lyrics like this. He described his procedure and his approach was perfectly reasonable. You can't just attribute something like this to unsafe computing and invoke the existence of undo. >> That's not acceptable. Something should be done that makes it impossible >> to get into so much trouble so easily, but without removing the powerful >> functionality that the Edit Lyrics scheme provides, and hopefully without >> requiring the system to be overhauled too drastically. > >If Finale works as I suspect it does, the most expedient solution will be >for the >lyrics subsytem, when in "edit lyrics" mode, to keep track of in which >syllable the >cursor is located relative to the begining of the block, and if the >editing being >done to the lyrics block decreases the number of syllables in the block, >to leave >all attributes assigning notes to syllables unchanged except the >assignment of the >syllable immediately after the cursor, so that if result of the change is >to combine >the syllables assigned to beats two and three, the new combined syllable >would be on >beat two, beat three would be empty, and beat four would remain as it >previously >was. Well, now we're back to my "row your boat" example. Sometimes you really do want to move all the syllables over. Indeed, the ONLY time I ever add a syllable in Edit Lyrics not at the end of the window is when I want to shift all the syllables over. >Since Finale seems to have an list of addresses in the text block at which the >beginning of locate the beginning of lyrics for each staff, one of the >responses of >the Lyrics subsystem to editing which changes the number of syllables in >the block >should be to adjust the value of any address with a higher value than where the >change was made so that only the current staff is affected. Thus, to adapt my >earlier example, if the Bass lyric starts at location 1, the Soprano at >location 15, >and the Alto at location 29, if the a new syllable is inserted between >syllable 4 >and 5, the value for the soprano staff should be increased to 16, and the >Alto to >30. This would keep the syllable assignments for the successive staves in the >lyrics block intact. This is the behaviour now with type into score, I >submit it >should also be the behaviour with "edit lyrics". I sympathize with your intention, but I object to your submission. Edit Lyrics has been around a long time, and it works. Type in Score came along later, grafted itself onto Edit Lyrics, and soon developed some roundabout routines that allowed it to follow its own logic. As long as it didn't interfere with the way things had been, I had no objection. Now you're telling me that Edit Lyrics needs to be changed so that it behaves like Type in Score. Please indulge me. If you want to propose safeguards, warnings, or new options, try to do it in a way that doesn't disturb what already does work. mdl _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
