On 29 Apr 2004 at 9:18, Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote: > At 06:25 PM 4/28/04 -0700, Mark D Lew wrote: > >Split points are absolute hell. The UI is awful, non-wysiwyg, and > >it's buggy. I avoid them as much as possible, even if it means > >breaking into smaller measures with invisible barlines and measure > >numbers redone. > > I gave up. Since it's my own music, I reformatted the pages to be > landscape format. Problem gone, at least for this score. > > I had forgotten how nasty split points could be. They're probably not > used often, but an improved tool with a simple auto-splitting sliding > bar feature (and full-time visual cue) would be great. It might also > solve those staggered measure issues... aw, heck, but that's for > another day. :)
Split points seems to me to be designed for only occasional use, for splitting the seldom-encountered measure that will make the layout look better where putting the whole measure on one or the other line wouldn't look good. I have a piece from 1806 that has a full measure of 128th notes in the piano part that has to be split to be readable at all. In that score, it's the only measure that is split. In a recent composition of mine, the meter is 12/8 with rhythmic activity at the 16th note in some passages, and in one place, I've split one measure, because otherwise, I ended up with a system of two loose measures followed by a system of 3 very tight measures. Without a split, I was just moving this problem from one system to another. But, again, it's only a single measure in the score. If I understand correctly what you're doing, it seems to me that your only solution is hidden meter changes. This is all a result of the metrical structure of Finale's underlying data structure. It would be nice if there were some kind of abstraction layer between the data storage and the presentation layer that would allow independent meters. Otherwise, we have a case of what Joel Sposky calls "leaky abstractions:" http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.html What he means is that the low-level programming leaks through to the level that affects what users can and cannot do. That is considered by him (and rightly so) to be a flaw. This is definitely a flaw in Finale, and one that really ought to be addressed if Coda cares about Finale's ability to notate real music. I would use independent meters in my own compositions and in my editions of early music -- it would be a wonderful tool. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
