At 12:05 pm +0200 5/10/02, Jari Williamsson wrote: >So do you suggest that we should move from the flexible >any-page-can-have-any-size to an only-one-page-size-per-document >approach?
Of course not. It's just the wisdom of requiring the user, especially the new user, to select the orientation of the paper in two different places that has me confused. Do you have situations where you print in two different _orientations_ within the same file? This would require printing with a portrait orientation for part of the job and a landscape orientation for the rest of the job. If so then Finale appears to allow this, but it would be much more confusing and error-prone for me to properly print out such a file than to handle it as two different files. (Now, if Finale knew how to auto-rotate its pages so that it compared its current page orientation with the orientation it was asked to print to and rotated for a best-fit...but then you couldn't print a reduced landscape to portrait....) If you have files in which individual pages are printed on paper of different size and/or orientation, and this works for you, Great! (frankly and non-sarcastically said). I have *no* problem with the capability being there and can see the advantages of it, but there really should be a default system for new users to assure that when they choose landscape or portrait in one location it is reflected in the other. For most people page orientation for a particular document is a constant; paper size for a specific printout is a constant for that copy of the document: They expect to be able to point the program to a particular printer and tray, tell it to print their document, and come back to find a few glaring editorial errors that force them to revise and print the job again. >Finale's built-in 2-up printing is indeed within the program. It >doesn't have anything to do with the printer driver. Yes. You can have Finale do this by choosing the correct radio button from Print...>Finale (on the Mac). You can also do this using the driver with Print...>Layout. I always use the latter so I don't know what the built-in version requires. The driver version does not require a portrait page to be printed in landscape to produce a 2-up layout. >> It makes little sense to print crop/registration marks for a >>portrait page on a landscape page. > >Not if the printer for example prints better in one direction than >the other, such as is often the case with inkjets. I don't know if I would have thought of that solution, but I can see why someone might want to try it; if the loss of quality from the (fairly significant) size reduction of the page didn't outweigh the improvement in quality from orientation. To return to the original locus of discussion: I would **never** advocate removing options from a program that expand its functionality. But: Advanced functionality should not unnecessarily penalize the naive user. Basic aspects of a program should be intuitively predictable from past experience. To conclude the syllogism, it seems that the new user should be able to predictably change the page orientation by choosing to do so only once. But then a syllogism can be either a valid exercise in deductive reasoning or result in a specious conclusion... :-) Best wishes, -=-Dennis -- _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
