On Apr 27, 2007, at 10:24 AM, shirling & neueweise wrote:
mark, holy crap, man, check this thing out. auto-placement
positions the expressions to avoid staves and the notes, really
worth the time, especially for people as meticulous as i think you
are (as i am) about positioning. of course there will always be
exceptions where adjustments will be necessary, but they involve
entering values like -12 EVPUs to make small adjustments instead of
changing -216 to -228 or whatever for high notes. and you have
75% less things to adjust when extracting transposing parts from
scores in C.
a really incredible time-saver. man, really, i can't even believe
you don't use it!
Heh. I don't use metatools for expressions either. My standard
procedure for entering an expression is the same as it's been for
about eight years now: I double click in the measure and pick the
expression I want from the list. At that point, the dialog box for
position comes up, so I type in the numbers I want for my H and V
position. Nine times out of ten I know exactly where I want it, so I
never have to move it. If I do move it, I will invariably go back
into the dialog and type new numbers. I never drag or eyeball,
because I'm a freak about wanting to specify the exact coordinates
about everything I place.
But I'm open-minded. If it really is going to save me so much time,
I'm willing to learn new habits.
I understand I can assign a default X and Y position to each
expression, so if I pick the most commonly used coordinates, I can
set up a metatool and save the trouble of going through the dialog
boxes at least on those occasions where the position I want is the
one I set up as the default, right?
I just now tried doing that, but my immediate problem is I can't
figure out how to use a metatool for an expression and not have it
show up on every staff. I don't see a place to define that. What am
I missing? Most of my work is piano-vocal and most of my expressions
I want on one staff only. If I can't get the metatool to put the
expression on one staff only then I have to go back through the
dialog box anyway which would defeat the purpose of the metatool.
I also noticed that once I assign a default position to an
expression, any time I enter that expression and want it somewhere
else, I have to type in the relative offset from the default position
instead of the absolute coordinates. That will take some getting
used to. I'm basically going to be doing math in my head each time,
like, "Let's see, I want this at -66, but my default position is
defined as -42, so I need to type in -24." I'm starting to doubt
that this is really going to save me time.
mdl
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