On 6 Aug 2005 at 14:15, Darcy James Argue wrote:

> 
> On 06 Aug 2005, at 12:42 PM, Andrew Stiller wrote:
> 
> > No. It behaves thus on my Mac (FinMac 2K4): Scroll view; drag to R 
> > w. hand-grabber. Enlarge to 200%. Return to 100%. Staff position 
> > will have reverted to default. I confess I have never considered 
> > this to be a bug, though I agree it would be better if the choice 
> > were left to the user.
> 
> Okay, I couldn't figure out what you were talking about at first, as 
> I couldn't duplicate the behavior you described.  But now I've got it 
> -- it depends *how* you change the view percentage.
> 
> Try this:
> 
> 1) In Scroll View drag to the right with the hand grabber.  Enlarge 
> and reduce the music by clicking on the score with the Zoom Tool.  
> The left barline stays where you dragged it.
> 
> VERSUS...
> 
> 2) In Scroll View drag to the right with the hand grabber. Enlarge 
> and reduce the menu with the View menu shortcuts (cmd-1, cmd-2, cmd-
> +, etc.).  The left barline is set to its default position.
> 
> That's how it works in MacFin -- don't know about the PC version.
> 
> I pretty much always zoom in and out by clicking with the Zoom Tool 
> (using the cmd-shift-click and cmd-shift-opt-click shortcut), so I 
> hadn't noticed that using the a different method causes different 
> behavior.

This is the thing about software QA and testing that is the hard part 
-- give two people the same task and they will come up with FOUR 
different ways to accomplish it!

I have *never* used the zoom tool to return to the original zoom 
percentage because I often zoom twice and then would need to unzoom 
twice instead of just hitting Ctrl-7 to return to my normal 75%. 
Also, I am never sure exactly how many times I've zoomed, so I'd be 
experimenting to get back to the original zoom percentage.

Secondly, if I've zoomed, I've usually done so in order to perform 
some kind of small-scale nudge with some tool *other* than the zoom 
tool. That means, select ZOOM, click the score, change tools and do 
my nudging, select ZOOM and click the score again. The zoom tool is 
useful for the magnifying because I don't know exactly which 
magnification will be the one I'll need for doing my editing. But 
since I know my target magnification after I'm back, the utility of 
the zoom tool vanishes.

Of course, relatively speaking, we're much better off than we could 
be. Consider the way Adobe Acrobat reader works (probably Mac users 
are never forced to use this abomination, since PDF rendering part of 
OS X) -- it does not retain your last-used Window size when starting 
up, it doesn't choose a smart size for the Window when starting up, 
it doesn't retain your last page view layout unless you go to Edit | 
Preferences (which, in a Windows program, is supposed to be found on 
the Tools | Options menu) and set it for one of the predefined 
magnifications (and that's assuming that one of the choices is what 
you want), and page navigation is terribly difficult for reading 
smoothly (this is an inherent flaw in using page layout for onscreen 
display, as is seen with Sibelius's hard-to-use page-only view).

So, things could be *much* worse in Finale.

BTW, from browsing the preferences I did discover a fix for the bad 
display of staff lines in Finale-produced PDF files. It's on 
Preferences | Display -- just check Smooth Line Art, and the bad 
rendering of staff line widths is gone! Unfortunately, nobody *else* 
looking at my Finale PDFs with Acrobat is likely to know to do that.

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

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