On 23 Jul 2005, at 00:33, Johannes Gebauer wrote:
However, what really needs to be improved is Finale's template handling. There is absolutely no reason that the wizard can only have two templates. If MM shipped Finale with, say, 5 different templates, representing European, American, Jazz etc standards People would probably find it much easier to find an ideal template for the task. Currently the Maestro Default file tries to accomodate a variety of styles, and none of them very well.
Quite right. However, if you use the Setup Wizard, even the most carefully constructed templates won't make any difference to the parameters which it sets automatically. For instance, the vertical spacing between staves. The Setup Wizard will always put staves the same distance apart in a system, no matter if they are vocal, single-staff instrument or multi-staff instrument staves. This is independent of any settings the user might try to control, in the Maestro Default file or elsewhere. The present setting might be OK for vocal staves, since it leaves enough room for a couple of verses, but for an instrumental ensemble it puts the staves much too far apart. And of course the staff spacing usually needs to be adjusted differently in each system depending on the music. The user interface for doing this is so bizarre that, not surprisingly, most people never bother with optimizing and messing around with those little staff handles. The disastrous results can be seen on http://www.finalemusic.com/showcase/
I just made a little test (very unscientific of course) - I downloaded ten pieces from the Finale Showcase, chosen at random in the chamber ensemble and orchestra categories. Not one of the scores had been optimized to permit individual staff spacing in different systems. In three of the scores the distance between staves had been reduced to something reasonable (between 216 and 266 EVPUs), but in the other seven scores the staves were spaced with the default distance of 320 EVPUs, needlessly wide.
Finale has quite sophisticated and customisable algorithms for horizontal spacing but leaves the vertical spacing to the user. And, as can be seen, the majority of users don't do much about it. It's time Finale offered automatic vertical spacing. Something like this:
- Automatic spacing between staves and between systems, with intelligent collision avoidance. The parameters should be stored in the template and used by the Setup Wizard (Johannes' suggestion of making more than two templates available for the Setup Wizard should be implemented).
- Of course it should be possible to override the automatic spacing. We need an improved user interface for moving staves and systems: it should be possible to move both staves and systems vertically using the page layout tool, without going through extra steps like "optimizing".
I'm going to put that, with a bit more detail, into a feature request: my two top priority feature requests are this and some form of house styles. Maybe some people on the list would like to join me?
Michael Cook _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
