On 4 Mar 2005 at 10:43, Johannes Gebauer wrote:

> The discussion these days seems to center very much "wouldn't it be
> nice if Finale did it this way" for many things which I doubt will
> actually make things better, at least for me.

You're missing the point of this discussion, which had its origins in 
a post by a Sibelius user who has problems with Finale. I'm trying to 
point out things that we long-time Finale users know as second nature 
(and can work just fine with) that I think fail to function in a 
natural or "common sense" fashion.

So, the kinds of "improvements" I'm proposing probably wouldn't make 
the lives of long-time Finale users easier to any significant degree 
(and would probably require a certain amount of adjustment), but 
that's not the audience my suggested "improvements" are aimed at.

Of course, automatic (or semi-automatic) optimization and 
automatic/semi-automatic multi-measure rests would make *my* life 
substantially easier, because I've often been annoyed at the way 
Finale does these things already. And I also think that making 
independent vertical adjustment of staves within systems a subsidiary 
feature of optimization is a mistake (why shouldn't they just all be 
vertically adjustable in the first place, as with lyrics?), as to get 
an obvious feature (dragging staves vertically within a system) is 
something you can't get except by applying a feature that is not 
obviously related to what you want to do (though I agree that in 
terms of the bigger picture, vertical staff spacing obviously *is* 
akin to removal of blank staves). 

So, for me, these kinds of changes would make things easier because 
they've been stumbling blocks for me in the past.

And I also think it would make things substantially easier for new 
users. I shudder to think how I'd justify the current situation with 
staff optimization and vertical staff spacing to a new user -- it 
only makes sense if you already are accustomed to using it that way.

-- 
David W. Fenton                        http://www.bway.net/~dfenton
David Fenton Associates                http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc

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