| Lon, Greg Hamilton, an excellent Finale copyist/engraver from Vancouver, called yesterday to tell me (among other things) that he had just had to do a project in Sibelius (he was working in Sibelius 3), so he effectively got paid to learn the program. He liked it a lot (and learned it quickly) and says there's much to recommend in it, and among those things was an ease of handling staff spacing. So I suspect that this is something that is handled differently that you just have yet to figure out. Greg, who does really good work, and is both informed and smart, certainly convinced me that there are things that make Sibelius worth considering, but I don't want to have to learn a new program. I want Finale to get better, so there is no important reason to consider switching. Among the things that keep me in Finale (besides being an old dog) are some of Bill Duncan's fonts. I haven't seen Sibelius' chord font, and I really love Bill's. And Bill's "softened" slashes and beautiful rhythmic notation font have become addicting for me. There are a couple of other things his fonts do to solve problems in Finale. His Salzedo note head font appears with correct vertical alignment in drum notation, and there are some clever smart shape solutions too. All these things make up a good part of the look of my Finale work, and I'm so used to seeing them, that I'd be loathe to leave them, even if Sibelius is a little better in some ways. However, Greg's experience was so positive that it does give me pause. OT: I lived in Cleveland Heights from 1946 to 1952, and I like Cleveland too. The kids I grew up with in Jr. High School knew the names of all the players on the Cleveland Indians (champions in 1948), but they also knew the names of the first chair players in the Cleveland Orchestra, so I think that was pretty cool. It seemed normal then, but unusual in retrospect. Chuck On Oct 6, 2005, at 2:28 AM, Lon Price wrote: So I finished this project, 24 tunes, most of them at least 4 pages in length. I had to go with "avoid lyric collisions," because the alternative would have created too many collisions for me to deal with. But using "avoid collisions" created some ugly results. Here's an example: the word "straight" under an 8th note at the end of a measure, tied to a note in the next measure. The left side of the 8th note is 5/8 of an inch to the left of the right barline. That looks really bad. One thing that I noticed: all syllables with word extensions are aligned left (instead of center) by default. When I change the alignment to center, it seems to help. But is that acceptable? Are syllables with word extensions SUPPOSED to be aligned left? Centering looks better to me, but what do I know? I like Cleveland. ;-) (I just looked in a Hal Leonard Beatles songbook, and most syllables with word extensions are aligned left, but some are centered. And I didn't find any of this unsightly extra spacing with tied notes, so whoever did this book either used a program that handles this issue, or else they got rid of the extra space manually.) Chuck Israels 230 North Garden Terrace Bellingham, WA 98225-5836 phone (360) 671-3402 fax (360) 676-6055 www.chuckisraels.com |
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