On 30 Jan 2011 at 11:06, Jari Williamsson wrote: > On 2011-01-29 23:35, David W. Fenton wrote: > > > 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). > > So such a plug-in would basically consist of 2 different parts: > * Insert rest groups in full rest measures > * Center rests that only consist of one rest division > > I think it would be most flexible to do 2 plug-ins here.
Hmm. I'm not sure I see why this should be separated out. The centering seems like it would just be a Boolean flag for the first one, though, of course, that would require a UI, or, at the very least, a dialog box with a Yes/No/Cancel to ask the question. Of course, I know zilch about how plugins are designed, so what makes sense to me in regard to implementation is of very little importance. I guess it *would* be useful to be able to run a centering plugin by itself on already existing music. On the other hand, if it could be implemented as two plugins with the first one allowing you the option of running the second one on the selected measures after creating the full-measure rests, that would be ideal. > I would also > think that the plug-in that insert rests should use a scratch document > to define how rests should be grouped for different time sigs. Since > there seems to be little agreement on how to group rests (specially > between different genres and time periods), a dialog UI would quickly > become too complicated and not very flexible. Yes, I realized that it's very difficult to determine how the rests should be defined for each time signature, and I can't even imagine how you'd design a UI for it without getting very, very complicated really fast. So, yes, a scratch document would work. On the other hand, you'd probably have to have defaults for each time signature, in the event that the plugin encounters a time signature not included in the scratch document. On the other hand, you could have the plugin compare the time sigs in the scratch document to the time signatures of the EMPTY measures in the target score, and if anything is left off, inform the user. That would actually be quite helpful, since you could run it without a scratch document, it would report "you need a model in the scratch document for these time signatures: 3/1, 6/2, 9/2" and then you could create it and run it again. That would be easier than manually going through your document and figuring out which time signatures you needed to define rests for. That would also mean you wouldn't have to define any defaults for the plugin to use in the absence of a model in the scratch document, which no doubt would make the plugin a lot easier to design! > There's a kind of version of a centered rests plug-in in TGTools. I have only a very old version of TG Tools. It may be that there's something more up-to-date that works in WinFin 2003, but I haven't looked. -- 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
