On 18 Sep 2002 at 8:52, Thomas Schaller wrote: > David W. Fenton wrote: > > > On 17 Sep 2002 at 19:34, Thomas Schaller wrote: > >> first of all - about the problem of having screwed up your original lyrics: > >> I'm afraid that those lyrics are no good anymore - depending on how much you > >> changed in the copied section you might be able to re-change everything, but > >> it most likely is way too time-consuming and the outcome is questionable at > >> best - sorry. > > > > I assume you mean only the lyrics for the staff that I'd edited. > > > > I've deleted and re-entered, and the incorrect hyphens are still > > there. > > It is VERY important to not only delete the lyrics in the Edit window or to > not only delete the lyrics in your score - you have to do it on both fronts > - once you do that, the wrong lyric assignments and wrong hyphens should be > gone.
Well, I've rescued the score, and fixed all the problems. I guess I was lucky that, for whatever reason, the lyrics for the top line of my score (the line that was messed) were, largely, the last thing that I entered. In the EDIT LYRICS window, all the problems were in the last block of lyrics. I'm guessing that if I'd entered the lyrics in a different order such that the top line's lyrics were in the beginning of the EDIT LYRICS window, that everything past that point would have been screwed up. Am I right in guessing that, when using TYPE IN SCORE, the EDIT LYRICS window is populated in the order in which you enter the lyrics, rather than in any logical order related to the score layout? That is, if the first thing you enter typing into the score is the bass line's lyrics, that will be the first thing in the EDIT LYRICS window? If that is so, then the whole user interface is incredibly badly designed from the get go! TYPE INTO SCORE should not work that way. What I understand now is that the lyrics subsystem is designed around a number of assumptions about the way lyrics ought to work: 1. all voices will sing exactly the same lyrics at one time or the other. 2. the punctuation and capitalization of the lyrics in all the voices will be exactly the same. Thus, you should enter the lyrics once, and then click assign from the single statement of the lyrics to particular notes. I think this is a really poor assumption, for TYPE INTO SCORE is the more obvious entry method, and it can't work that way. It creates a complete jumble in the EDIT LYRICS window. Anyway, on to my solution: I took someone's advice to insert !!!! and @@@@ symbols in the lyrics via TYPE IN SCORE so that I could find them in the EDIT LYRICS window. What I saw was a jumble of lyrics, with parts of one word stuck in the middle of other words. Clearly, the order in which I'd entered was not exactly linear. Then I took Thomas's advice above and tried deleting lyrics in the EDIT LYRICS window first, and found that I was then missing things in the score. So, following through with Thomas's advice, I then deleted the lyrics that remained in the score. This caused a mess with the rest of the lyrics of the piece (the problem starts in m. 20 of a 200-measure score), but using SHIFT LYRICS, I manually, one note at a time, shifted the remainder of the lyrics to their proper location. I then went back and using TYPE IN SCORE, inserted the proper lyrics. With a little finagling, I eventually got rid of all the erroneous hyphens and strikeovers, and got everything into the right place. And I never heard anything back from Coda, either. I conclude that writing to WinSupport is a waste of time. I'm also very, very glad that I didn't take the advice of the doomsayers on this list who said all my lyrics were hosed and that I should delete them all and start over. I deleted far less than 10% of the lyrics and was able to fix the problem through systematic application of the principle of working between the EDIT LYRICS window and TYPE IN SCORE. Knowing what I know now, I don't know if I'd try typing in the lyrics and then click assigning. I understand the logic there, but the CLICK ASSIGNMENT window has got to be the most user unfriendly window I've ever seen -- the visual feedback is very poor, it can't be resized, you can't really tell where you are, it's hard to go back without losing your place. I'm not sure I could do that with a piece where there is lots of repetition of lyrics (as there is in Mozart's Requiem). My conclusion is that I'm not sure how to approach the problem next time. Yes, I understand better how it all works, but I didn't get any of that from the documentation (though I admit I have never done the lyrics tutorial -- TYPE INTO SCORE seems too straightforward to need a tutorial; lesson learned, I guess). And I really never got an explanation from the responses here on the list. In short, this subsection of Finale is a horrid mess. It is built around a number of rigid assumptions about the way lyrics work in real musical situations and because of the rigidity with which those assumptions have driven the design of the user interface, the bolted- on TYPE INTO SCORE feature (by far the most intuitive way to enter lyrics, seems to me), which is very poorly connected to the underlying data storage, very easily leads users into creating a mess that will become corrupted very easily. One of the reasons my lyrics were such a mess is because I entered them from an existing score, two pages at a time. That is, from one opening of my source score, for example, I typed in the bass lyrics, then the alto, then the soprano and then the tenor. That is a PERFECTLY LOGICAL entry method. But because the user interface is not sufficiently abstracted from the data storage, this creates a huge mess in the EDIT LYRICS window (the canonical text). In fact, it seems to me that the canonical text is what displays in the score, not what displays out of context in the EDIT LYRICS window. So, I understand how and why, but I still think the whole thing is a huge mess, fraught with potential errors for the user that should be prevented by a properly designed and implemented user interface. This should have been done last Monday, but now I'm not sure if I'll be able to finish it by *next* Monday. Yes, I was ignorant of a lot of important information, but a proper application interface should never require such intimate understanding of the underlying structures just to be usable in a fashion that doesn't make a hash of your data. -- David W. Fenton | http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates | http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
