On Jun 26, 2007, at 2:09 PM, shirling & neueweise wrote:
i just discovered something that made me very happy... how long has it been possible to make expressions have an "opaque" enclosure?
They've been around for as long as I can remember. At least since 2000, I think.
In the old days I would often use a null expression with an opaque border as a sort of "white-out" if I needed to mask something.
Finale's drawing order is fixed. You need to be able to attach your opaque expression to something that draws after whatever you want to blank out and before whatever you don't want to blank out. Often the drawing order works in your favor. Sometimes it doesn't, in which case you're just out of luck.
I used to know the drawing order, but it's been so long since I've done it. It was mostly a kludge tool, and kludges aren't necessary as often as they used to be.
More recently, I've still occasionally used the opaque enclosure for its immediate purpose: to have a white buffer around an expression. In particular, if I've got a long expression in the middle of a piano staff and it needs to cross a barline, I prefer to blank out a gap in the barline where the text passes through. Usually you have to tweak the enclosure to make it look right. The centered default only looks good if you happen to have an ascender and no descender where it crosses the line.
mdl _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
