On Oct 14, 2006, at 4:11 AM, dc wrote:
shirling & neueweise écrit:
i visited someone today who showed me some very decent examples by
his company, created with finale, score and sibelius. i could
tell which was which in most of the cases, but doubt that the
average user could tell the difference. finale is far superior
in dealing with complex part extraction than score or sibelius,
but score's spacing is much more sophisticated.
How did you recognize the different examples? Besides the fonts, of
course. I've often tried to find out from Score users what was so
much better, and never got any precise answers. You say the spacing
is "much more sophisticated", but what do you mean by that? What
can you do in Score, spacing-wise, that you can't do in Finale? I
had a friend who used both for professional engraving, and the only
thing I ever got out of her was that she preferred Score's
"algorithms" (?).
I have never seen something I could recognise as Score output, but
from visiting the Lilypond site (and other clues, like the usual
engraving books) I have developed more of an eye for Finale's
shortcomings in the spacing department. I am looking critically at
older classical engravings now, and discovering some subtle things
that I never would have noticed before.
Some things Finale doesn't do well in spacing: when there is a large
interval, or when the stems change direction, Finale spaces the two
notes exactly the same as if there was a small interval or no stem
direction change. I never realised it before, but hand-engraved parts
often push the spacing a bit to make them LOOK identical, while they
aren't identical according to strict measurement. Also the way
spacing changes when there are accidentals - Finale doesn't do TOO
badly, but it is not exactly as someone might do it in hand
engraving; it changes according to density, for one thing. When there
is a lot of room, Finale is actually pretty good, but it needs more
and more tweaking as the density increases. Chords with large numbers
of accidentals are too widely-spaced in Finale, compared to older
editions. And obviously, Finale completely drops the ball as soon as
lyrics are involved. Admittedly, lyrics are a thorny problem that I
never have enough time to sort out properly, but I wish Finale could
deal with them a LITTLE better.
Now, this doesn't mean that you can't go in and get Finale's spacing
looking very close to how a hand engraver would do it, but if Score
can do this with less fuss, that would be a valid point in Score's
favour.
Perhaps someone with a fine engraver's eye will make a "Score spacing
plugin" one day, kind of like Patterson Beams. But I bet all the
engravers will STILL tweak the results!
Christopher
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