Ryan Beard wrote:
I’m working on a song cycle for a client. He wants aFor the heck of it, I've played around with this, and I would answer your question, "yes, and no".
table of contents with dot leaders to appear at the
front of the collection. I know Finale’s Text Block
tool is pretty primitive, but can it handle something
like this? Is there away to make the “tab” a fixed
distance rather than a set number of spaces so things
will at least align properly?
The "no" is that Finale will not automatically handle dot leaders the way you describe.
The "yes" is that you can incorporate into your use of the text-block tool some of the techiniques that were used when books (and music books) were printed with handset type. In setting a page of a table of contents, a printer would set the text, then inset a solid line of dots of the necessary width, then set the page number. To properly align the dots, he would include a spacer of appropriate width. Now these spacers are not immediately available, but there is a way to get the same effect in a text block. Assume you have a line in the TOC, and using four spaces between the end of the line, and the first dot leader is too short, but five spaces is too long. To get the right distance, type five spaces, and in the text block editor, select one of the five spaces by click and drag, and change the point size of that space to a smaller value. By experimenting, you can get the correct value to make the dots align vertically.
Note that this technique does not work the other way. That is, you cannot type four spaces and change one of the spaces to a larger point size. The reason is that the characters have a fixed ratio of height to width, and if you increase the width, you also increase the height. In the text tool, the default line spacing is determined by the tallest character in the line, so the wider character being also higher this will cause the spaciing between the line and the one above and the one below to be increased, too. Reducing the character operates the same way, that is, the narrower character is also shorter, but this is not noticeable because the other characters on the line are still the original height.
I have seen another technique used in some books set with handset type, where it appears from the fact that the TOC listing, the page numbers, and the leaders do not exactly align, that the three groups were set in different, with the dot leaders perhaps being a solid block. This, too, can be approximated in Finale by typing the TOC as two or three separate text blocks, with the content descriptions, leaders, and page numbers all residing in columnar frames. Alternatively, a similar effect can be achieved by typing the descriptions in a left justified column on the left side of a text block, and and page numbers in a right justified column at the right side of the page. You can create a second text block, narrower in width, containing your dot leaders, and place that text block on top of the text block containing the descriptions and page numbers. This techique can also be used with "box drawing" fonts to create borders.
I have used both the typesetting methods above, and the Dave Bailey's suggestion of doing the TOC in a word processing document. The way I decide which to use is how I plan to print the item out. If I want to print a booklet, using Finale's page ranges, I use the text blocks as described above. If I'm not concerned about being able to use the booklet printing facilities in Finale, I'm more likely to use the word processing method.
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