On 29 Jan 2011 at 21:56, Jari Williamsson wrote: > I'm planning to create a plug-in to space full measure rests > proportionally. The things that the plug-in should handle: > * A full measure rests with "long" time signature should require more > space than a full measure rest with a short time signature
It seems to me, this only matters when you have mixed time signatures. When there's a single long time signature, I want the empty measures taking up as little space as possible, as long as it's still legible. > * A long multimeasure rests should require more space than a short > multimeasure rest I find spacing of multimeasure rests problematic -- they don't respond to layout updates the way other measures do, and I find I often have to set them manually. They are almost always too wide in Finale's default spacing, but I don't know what rule I'd propose. One thing I would say is that there should be a ceiling on how wide the multi-measure rest ever gets, rather than width proportional to the number of measures. While a 6-measure rest should be wider than a 2-measure rest, I don't think a 24-measure rest should be wider than a 12-measure rest, certainly not twice as wide. > I would like feedback on how you would like this proportionality to be > handled: > * Should it be proportional to the current spacing factor? Certainly it should take into account the music spacing options, specifically, the minimum measure width. I would want a single measure of rest to be the minimum measure width (as long as it's not set so low that it's less than the width of the rest character being used). > * How much space should a full measure rest require, compared to a > multi-measure rest? So far as I'm concerned, a 1-measure rest and a 2-measure rest should be the same width. I see no utility in making them different widths. > * Should multimeasure rest widths be proportional to the actual beat > duration within the multimeasure rests? No. The measures should be sized to fit the music characters required to draw whatever is in the measure of rest, with loose proportionality, where longer rests are somewhat wider than shorter ones. > * Other things? I've been dealing with this creating a complicated set of parts, and would love to see a plugin that would fill in proper rests for empty measures. That is, in the piece I'm working on, most of it is 4/2 and I have the double-whole rest set as the default rest. But there are measures of 3/2, 3/1, 6/2 and 9/2, some of which have rests in some of the parts, and I'd love a plug-in that would insert the appropriate rests in those measures and center them according to the same algorithm used for centering the default empty measure rest. The complication there is deciding what kind of rests these meters should have. For 3/2, I used dotted whole, for 3/1, dotted double whole rest, for 6/2, two dotted whole rests, and for 9/2 three dotted whole rests. For these latter two, there's no centering, of course, but for the first two, I have to center them manually. A plug-in that did this would be super, but of course, I'm using such an old version of Finale (2003) that I won't be able to use it. But I should be upgrading someday soon, so I'd get the benefit if you created such a plug-in (or included that functionality in the presently-discussed one). -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
