On 23 Sep 2002 at 0:44, Mark D. Lew wrote: > At 8:06 PM 09/22/02, David W. Fenton wrote: > >But I feel *very* uncomfortable with click assigning the lyrics. One > >problem is the size of the dialog and the fact that it is tough to > >tell where you are in repetitive text. But I discovered another > >problem trying it out today -- the score doesn't automatically update > >properly, even when you check off the checkbox for that. So, I'd be > >assigning lyrics, but couldn't see the result onscreen. Because of > >this, I only did about 5 measures of it, as I just cannot get > >comfortable with flying blind in something that is so incredibly > >prone to problems. > > By "automatically update" I gather you mean Automatic Music Spacing and/or > Automatic Update Layout? . . .
No. I mean the AUTO UPDATE checkbox in the click assignment dialog. I assume it's intended to update the score in the background, but it is not reliable. It seems to work for the first syllable of a measure, and then the lyrics go blank for the rest of the measure, and do not re-appear until the dialog is closed. I could *never* work in that situation -- it's working way too far from the actual score, with far too much possibility for error. [] > >[...] > >As I've said repeatedly, Mozart's Requiem DOES NOT HAVE MULTIPLE > >VERSES. > > And as I've replied repeatedly, I don't mean verses in the literal sense of > the word, I mean the "verses" as provided in Finale software. How many > times do we have to go through this? You are the one that worded the part you cut in a fashion that made it sound like everybody knows that one should use separate verses for individual staves, that it's the obvious thing to do. There's nothing OBVIOUS about it at all. In fact, it's quite convoluted. That's my only point, even if it *is* the best way to work around the severe flaws in Finale's lyrics implementation. > As I've already explained, in the case of Mozart's Requiem, my instinct > would have been to put the different voice parts into different "verses". That's *your* instinct. There's absolutely nothing intuitive or obvious about that. Your instinct comes from your long experience of struggling with lyrics and you've discovered a kludge that makes things works more reliably. > If all the movements are to be in a single Finale file (which isn't my > usual practice), I'd also use separate verses for the texts of different > movements. (Myself, I probably would also separate the "requiem" from the > "kyrie" in No. 1, and the "benedictus" from the "hosanna" in the No. 11, > though I'm guessing most others wouldn't go that far.) > > I like keeping distinct chunks of text separate, so that makes sense to me. > You're telling me (again) that this doesn't feel logical to you. I know, I > heard you the first time. But you were once again harping on the idea that my problems were self-made, that if I'd only used verses, my problems would have been less severe. Workarounds like mis-using verses for segregating text divisions are not obvious at all. [] > >Well, I'm not about to start using click assignment, because the UI > >is too scary for me to become comfortable with it. I do know that I > >should never try deleting lyrics with TYPE IN SCORE if hyphens are > >involved, because that leads to excess hyphens in the source text > >stream. Other than that, I can work around it. > > It's true that deleting a syllable with type-in-score never removes any > hyphen from the text stream. If you delete a syllable which had a hyphen on > either side of it in the text stream, that will result in redundant hyphens > in the text stream. But those redundant hyphens have no effect, so I fail > to see the problem. In fact, it seems to me that if you've got a syllable > you want to delete, then deleting it in type-in-score is safer than the > alternatives. It actually doesn't work that way, unless you are replacing something in the score with a blank space or another syllable that falls at the same location in a word. Try this: Create a new document, and input 4 quarter notes. With TYPE IN SCORE, put in Hal-le-lu-jah as the lyrics Now, go to the le syllable, and change it to "le,". Then change the "lu" to "Deutsch-" and the "jah" to "land." You'll see that you have a leftover hyphen that is actually not redundant -- it doesn't belong there at all. In edit lyrics, you'll see that the stray hyphen that used to be attached to the "le" of hallelujah is now appended to the beginning of "Deutsch," and there is no way in TYPE IN SCORE to get rid of it. You *must* edit the lyrics in the EDIT LYRICS window. Since you do click assignment, you'd never see this. This would be avoidable *if* SHIFT LYRICS worked reliably. My problem with it is that it tends to mess up the assignments of syllables to the left/right of the shifting point. I did a lot of this last evening, and found that on Chri-ste e-le-i-son (where the le is a very long melisma terminated by syllabic "i-son"), SHIFT LYRICS would completely mess this up, putting the "le" right next to the "i-son" syllabically, while leaving the "Chri-ste e-" where it belonged. I tried a number of strategies and different settings, but could not manage to get it to retain the original syllable spacing when shifting lyrics. So, it's unusable for fixing this, and the only way is either to delete the syllables in TYPE IN SCORE and enter replacements, or to unassign the lyrics and then re-assign them with click assignment. I'd rather use TYPE IN SCORE and then fix the hyphens in EDIT LYRICS than rely on the very shaky UI of the click assignment dialog. [] > It might be a nice feature to automatically trim redundant hyphens and > spaces whenever editing the lyric text causes them to come about. > Logically, the redundant hyphens are irrelevant, and in a more > communicative type-in-score UI as described above, they wouldn't need to > appear at all. This option would only exist for the sake of type-in-score > users who visit the Edit Lyrics window and get confused by it. In the example I gave above, the hyphens aren't redundant -- they are *wrong*. I see no reason why the hyphen immediately to the right of a syllable that is deleted in TYPE IN SCORE should not in all cases be deleted. It makes perfect sense to me -- if the syllable whose ending is symbolized by the hyphen is gone, the hyphen can serve no function whatsoever, and should be deleted. [] > >I hope this is a priority for Coda. It is certainly by far the worst > >part of Finale I have encountered in a long, long time. > > I'd love to see them improve the lyric system, though admittedly I'm far > more interested in fixing up peripheral details like word extensions and > improved spacing, as opposed to redoing the data structure (not gonna > happen) or revamping the UI (possible). The problem is the UI of TYPE IN SCORE and the lack of any information about the assignments in the EDIT LYRICS window. I really don't quite understand how one is supposed to make sense out of the data there, as there is no place anywhere that would tell you what is assigned to what if you used click in score. I have figured out that I'm not going to use spaces any more to advance the TYPE IN SCORE cursor, as it puts all those redundant spaces in EDIT LYRICS -- I'm simply going to pick up the mouse and click on the next word. If the UI for click assignment were usable at all, I'd use that, but it is simply unacceptable as far as I'm concerned. > I've been saying this since version 3.0, and although we've seen several > improvements since then, lyrics have never been a priority in upgrades. I > assume that it's because users who care about lyrics are a minority. Even > those users who do employ lyrics are primarily non-engravers who don't much > care what they look like. In the world of low-budget performing, I've seen > all sorts of amateur scores with lyric syllables smashed together every > which way. I was in a show recently where the composer had entered all > lyrics (not in Finale) with no hyphens at all throughout the entire score. > (In a few spots it became an amusing little puzzle to figure out what the > words were.) So, you don't think Coda cares about implementing features that help those non-engravers get results that don't look bad? I *hope* they care, since those people are certainly in the majority of Finale users! -- 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
