On 2 Feb 2011 at 16:48, dc wrote: > Jari Williamsson écrit: > >As I understand it, there are at least 2 "schools" regarding > >barlines: One with thicker barlines than staff lines, and one with > >same width. For parts (but not for scores) I often use thicker > >barlines than staff lines. > > I recall reading somewhere (but where?) that it isn't good for > legibility to have lines the same size in both directions. (My stems > are thicker than my staff lines, and by barlines are a bit thicker > than my stems.)
This is exactly the kind of discussion that I think points out the difference between professional engravers and normal users. I consider myself a "normal" user (for some definition of "normal," of course!) -- I don't tweak this kind of stuff. It looks just fine to me with Finale's defaults. I spend all my time tweaking layout to get legibility and page turns, not small-scale details like that. You guys probably consider these line-width issues to be important for "legibility," but for me, as someone accustomed to playing from all kinds of sources, engraved, handwritten, etc., I'm much less concerned with that than with getting the stuff out quickly and readably, and laid out in a way that works well in performance. These kind of low-level defaults are exactly what I meant by my point about the different engraving programs. Sibelius requires less tweaking than Finale (though if you don't like Sibelius's defaults, it can be more difficult to overcome them than with Finale), so far as I can tell, because it just won't let you produce something stupid (as Finale does). On the other hand, the past three weeks, I've spent most of my time redoing things that were earlier correct. I'm really, really over the model of page layout where settings follow the system on the page, and are not connected to the actual music that's displayed in a particular system. I've spent SO MUCH time redoing lyrics vertical spacing and re-optimizing because I was tightening up layout to use fewer pages. Basically, I've concluded that you have to use Finale the way old-style engravers did -- decide on the layout on the front end, freeze it, and don't do any final adjustments until the page layout is completely frozen. I'd certainly like a better way of doing all of that, but I'm stuck with Finale since I don't have time to learn something else. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
