At 04:10 PM 7/22/05 +1000, Matthew Hindson Fastmail Account wrote: >Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote: >> >> The Graphire font (Revere) is not even the same character order, and it has >> some sort of zero-width parameter, so it can't be used as text in other >> documents -- characters appear one on top of the other. I'd experimented >> unsuccessfully with using it in Finale ... > >What you'd do in this case (using Fontographer or whatever) is to clear >the characters in the Maestro font, but not the widths. Then paste in >the characters from Revere into what's left of Maestro (using the >Maestro character slots), also carefully preserving the Maestro widths. >Tedious for an hour to be sure. > >It would of course be illegal to do this most likely - what is the >status of 'abandonware' these days?
Revere and Music Press aren't abandoned -- they're just no longer being developed. It's my understanding that the Graphire product was being transferred to another company. But since Graphire is a privately held company, I'm not privy to the behind-the-scenes. There is a user support group and listserv that continues to work on it, and is even now trying to develop a patch to make Midi work on the newer Mac operating system. The Revere font has never been released separately and in fact was fiercely protected by the original programmer. Now that I've been successful modifying other fonts, I would Fontographer-ize it for my own use in Finale -- except that I have handed over my copy of Graphire to another engraver and no longer have the right to use it. Indeed, I think Graphire's high price, wacky licensing terms (you could buy it by number of hours) and dongle-based protection scheme (which as the documentation author I fought and got nowhere in having changed) were responsible for its demise. It was never competitive in price, and the investment required to re-learn music entry (if you were coming from Finale, the only real alternative at the time) meant it really had to shine. And it did. In terms of printed results -- badly revealed by the comparison pages that started this thread -- it was unparalleled, requiring almost no fussy adjustments once a house style had been set up. House styles really had meaning in Graphire, too, with master pages and several levels of layered control in the manner of Pagemaker. I can't praise enough how logically it worked design-wise ... no matter how I disliked its engraver-style approach to music entry and difficulty in post-entry editing. Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
