On 5 Jun 2004 at 1:34, Christopher BJ Smith wrote: > At 9:29 PM -0700 6/04/04, Eric Dannewitz wrote: > >Christopher BJ Smith wrote: > >> > >>I just think that if you are going to have to re-jig almost every > >>aspect of your part layout once you change something, why not just > >>re-extract parts again? > > > >Why do you think that? Say you change 8 measures of music, is that > >going to screw up the whole page format? > > Yes! If you have added notes where they had rests before! Or added > 8ths where they had whole notes, etc. Especially if it's the FIRST 8 > bars. Nothing to do but reformat.
But you'd have to redo it with extracted parts, too, so on this kind of change the two approaches are equivalent. But on less drastic changes, such as fixing wrong notes, tweaking dynamics, changing bowings after a read-through, and so forth, linked parts would be substantially less work. Why discard the advantages of linked parts just because they wouldn't cook your breakfast for you every morning? > >>Actually, we kind of have that feature already. (snip) > > > >Thats like letting Finale print the parts for you. I can't ever > >remember doing that and liking the results. It would be great to keep > >a score and the parts together in ONE file, and have separate layouts > >for each. Then you can change the music, but you have to go through > >and redo all the page layouts. > > As was mentioned a message or two ago, you can set the page layout, > and adjust items but NOT separately for each part. That's the "kind > of" I was talking about. Maybe a better implementation would make it > more usable for me. That's why I don't use special part extraction except when I need to extract more than one staff to a part. Even then, it annoys me that I have to initiate a separate file. If special part extraction kept its layout settings separate for each part and separate from the full score, it would provide the linked parts capability I'd like to see. But it doesn't do that. > >>I dunno, previous experience? (Lyric Tool, Ossia Tool, Midi Tool, > >>certain aspects of the Repeat Tool, to name a few.) > > > >Lyric tool works well. > > Try adding or copying lyrics when a word has two syllables across a > barline. And how do you shift syllables for the second verse without > messing up the first verse? It's true that it is better than it was, > but one still has to be careful, or major screw-ups can occur. It has improved? You brought up lyrics in response to my suggestion that you are assuming that a major overhaul is going to break things that already work. Here you're admitting that lyrics are, in fact, better than they used to be. > >Repeat Tool too. > > Not the repeat symbols, like the $ or the coda target. They never stay > where you put them (up to version 2003). This has not changed much > since 3.2. Again, this is just one of many old bugs that have been hanging around. I can see arguing that those should be fixed before embarking on major overhauls to parts of Finale that are already usable. But I don't think it's at all valid to use those long-persisting bugs as an argument against no major overhauls. What if Coda had fixed these bugs of yours instead of re-doing the text tool back in Finale 3.x? Isn't the huge improvement in usability of the text tool much more of a productivity improvement than the fixing of any one of those tiny bugs? What about the improvements in page layout in Finale 98 (or was it 2K1?)? Should those have been left out to fix a number of small bugs, instead? -- 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
