Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote:
Aside from the third-party plugin issues you mentioned, they were also very useful for repairing damaged files since they were plain ASCII. It wasn't fun, but a misdirected pointer could be fixed by hand. Saving and loading files also magically cured other glitches.
Also, you could do mass edits with a text editor. I did this on several occasions, when the Finale UI would have been out of the question, and there was no plugin to do exactly what I wanted.
It is no longer necessary now, but it used to be that linked graphics would get orphaned if you moved the files, and there was no way to re-link them. (Now, Finale provides a relink button.) In those days, you could edit the ETF to point the path to the correct location of the linked file.
It was only rarely that I ever used ETF outside developing 3rd party plugins, but every time I did, it literally saved me hours. I will sorely miss ETF.
That said, I've been told that even in Fin06 there were certain features that would be lost when you saved to ETF. I don't know what they were, though. It was probably something related to the studio view, but that's only a guess. The point is, Fin06 was already deprecating ETF, but MM didn't bother to tell anyone.
-- Robert Patterson http://RobertGPatterson.com _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
