At 09:09 AM 2/26/05 -0500, you wrote: >In your tool bar mockup, where are the "create" and "delete" buttons >for text expressions? These are such useful buttons in the present >interface that I would hate to lose them.
Just forgotten as I tried to focus on how to 'commonize' the other elements. >Also for the Page attachment, are we able to select page ranges, and >discontiguous ranges at that? No reason why not. (I'm mostly going for concept, trying to see what might work.) >Or have I completely misunderstood again, and you are suggesting this >toolbar IN ADDITION to the present dialogue box? I would say 'in addition'. Doesn't most complex software that uses active toolbars also include dialogs, menus, keystrokes, and (as in the case of sequencers) text definitions to do the same thing in different ways? A toolbar could come with the complete set of existing attributes assigned to the common tasks -- i.e., the 'default document' setup would be replicated in the toolbar to start with. Much information in Finale is both hidden and specialized to the point of (my) frustration, particularly when doing the diversity of scores I get. It's not all about a toolbar. I think of the questions asked here and look for solutions as if I were a Finale designer. Time signatures are among the questions, which is why I suggest including them as one of the text objects as such an obvious (to me!) solution. For example, a question that comes up regularly (for which I made a Maestro-based font set) is the stretched time signature. My solution turns the time signature into ordinary text with the ability to assign it temporal attributes -- so it can be stretched anywhere, even placed anywhere, and made out of anything. It wouldn't damage the 'default' attributes assigned to 4/4 or 6/8, for example, but it would open up fractional (as opposed to decimal) time signatures, stacked signatures (one above the other for explanatory purposes, even in different sizes), parenthetical signatures, inverted signatures (and clefs, too, for those Baroque canonical pieces), note-based demoninators, alternative numerical denominators (4/3), textual signatures, symbols (such as the circle for triple and the broken circle [as opposed to the "c"] for duple), or symbolic references. Does it trump the time signature dialog box? Not at all, if you like it. But the resulting time signature becomes a text object with attributes, appears on the toolbar, and can be changed from "4/4" to something like "4/4 [nb: 12/12]" in a few keystrokes. Or vice versa. If you've used 3/4 and the editor later says they want "O" for a historical look, drop the list, edit the text using whatever font has the symbol, and you're done -- no hiding signatures and spacing for them, building expressions and applying them, etc. When using Finale, I always ask myself, "Why is this hard? What would I do to make it easy?" Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
