On 6 Jul 2005 at 13:46, John Howell wrote: > At 5:22 AM -0500 7/6/05, Jim wrote: > >David, I have not experienced linked parts yet. The descriptions i > >see here, however, leave me wondering what I'm missing. Can you > >enlighten me as to their benefit? I'm not sure I see the benefit of > >having an ex-post change made to a PART be reflected in the SCORE. > >Some changes in parts I would NOT want reflected in a score. Is this > >feature intelligent enough to sort that out? > > Composer's Mosaic from MOTU (no longer supported as far as I know) has > had linked parts from day one, along with the ability (indeed, the > requirement!) to customize the layout of each part (which can be done > at least in part using templates). It is NOT intelligent in any way, > and a mistake entered in either score or parts is instantly reflected > in the other. That simply means that the engraver has to be > intelligent! I agree 100% that the ability to control what is linked > and what is not in both directions is essential in any Finale > implementation.
Defining that doesn't seem all that complex to me. What needs to be identical in both is that which is, of necessity, identical in both -- they must convey the same musical text (notes, rhythms, articulations, expressions, slurs). Everything regarding appearance and layout should be independent, with a newly created part view inheriting the score's positioning by default, until an item is repositioned. I don't see anything particular complex about that. Now, whether or not things like beam breakage and angle and other elements that are at some level purely "cosmetic" should be linked, I don't know. I can't think of a strong argument either way for beaming, though I think that, in particular, avoidance of wedges is going to be rather difficult if beam angle/position in transposing parts is linked between parts and a concert-pitch score. That is another of the arguments for why the functionality in Patterson Beams belongs as part of the basic beaming algorithms, and not as a plug-in that's applied to make adjustments to the data after entry. But that's the only notational detail that looks at all problematic to me. It occurs to me that it would also be nice if it were possible to extend the conditional display characteristics of measure expressions to other kinds of data. I might want to have bowings appear only in the parts, and not in the score, for instance (it's perfectly doable today by check DISPLAY ONSCREEN ONLY, or whatever the choice is in the articulation definition). I just don't see insoluble problems in making these determinations. I also think that the linkage should not be something you can turn on or off for each kind of object, unless there's some kind of data where it is sometimes desirable to link and sometimes not. And maybe some things could be implemented by making staff styles have the capability of being specific to a view, so that you could define a staff style that displays one way in score view and another in part view. Just a thought, but it really seems to me to open up a whole host of useful possibilities to make Finale more usable. -- 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
