On Wed, February 2, 2011 2:58 am, Gerhard Torges wrote: >> They were done by a composer/engraver who is now >> living as a monk and no longer uses technology. > > Now that's an interesting story! > Where can I read more about that?
You can't; he's a very private person. He wrote the Graphire documentation, and he and I co-authored the last version. He was the earliest Graphire user (the first one after the author), could do anything with the program, and drove the improvements from a composer's point of view. The curved staff lines you see in the Graphire demo pages were easy to make with Graphire; although I did them for a Christian Wolff score in Finale, it was a real pain because Finale always got in its own way. To me, Graphire's menu system was way superior to Finale or Sibelius. You always knew where you were, what behavior was in play, and all the settings affecting the selected object or tool. (I presented a Finale version mock-up several years ago on this list that elminated some 80% of the current dialog boxes, but it wasn't met with much enthusiasm.) I had always hoped Finale would buy the Graphire GUI and 'metrical engine'. The programmer was a graphics designer as well as a musician, and he designed that gorgeous Revere font (that I've adapted for my own Finale scores). Revere had zero dimension embedded in the font metrics, and its placement was controlled by the program. Very nice trick. The site is still alive, and there's another guy acting as a middle-man for the remaining users. I think there's still the hope someone will buy it and overhaul it for modern Mac OSes (it still works fine on my Windows system). Sold at a competitive price (say $100 a copy) it would really be a fine addition to engravers' toolkits. I know the author was very concerned about piracy, which is why his original version included a dongle -- you could buy a very expensive unlimited version or a by-the-hour version. I think that fear was the program's real downfall. A number of Hollywood orchestrators would swear by Graphire for how quickly they could get flawless parts out to musicians; the private discussion list is still active. Anyway, I didn't adapt well myself to how Graphire worked because I was a Finale user for 8 years by the time I started trying Graphire; I rarely used it for my own scores because it had no Midi output for doing demos. Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
