At 2:38 PM 06/09/03, Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote: >I don't use Finale's numerical boxes. I never have used them ... except for >tuplets and to set up certain features ahead of time, or to recover from >some sort of disastrous error I've made. :) Most everything I eyeball.
Ah! In that case, no discussion of my methods is going to be of much interest to you. I'm pretty much the exact reverse. Chacun à son goût. [Dennis again, in another post] >It's that last business of moving systems out of each other's way -- which >is usually done in just enough time to print score & parts for rehearsal :) >-- that makes me crazy in layout mode. I will agree that Finale layout has >come a looooooooong way since I first worked with it (version 2.2 on >Windows 3.1), but it still resists my will. "Put it here! Now! And *don't* >fall over on the next page! Oh, I did it again! *#&$(#&$(&#(@!!!" This is unfamiliar ground for me, since I don't ever drag systems intentionally, but I think maybe I understand the problem. Finale doesn't record the vertical position of a system on the page; rather, it records the vertical distance between a system and the next. Thus, if you grab system 2 and drag it down, you are not changing the position of system 2 per se; rather, you are adding to the amount of vertical space between system 1 and system 2. The amount of vertical space between system 2 and system 3 remains unchanged. If you're thinking in terms of vertical position on the page, the effect is that when you drag system 2, you're "moving" every system from 2 onward. Apparently, you want to move system 2 down while leaving system 3 exactly where it is relative to the page. From Finale's point of view, that means you want to add to the distance between systems 1 and 2 while simultaneously subtracting from the distance between systems 2 and 3. As far as I know, this isn't possible, but I see no reason why it shouldn't be. An exact analogy is with dragging barlines left or right using the measure tool. Finale doesn't record the horizontal position of a barline; rather, it records the width of a measure. If you grab a barline and drag it to the right, what is really happening is that you are adding to the width of the prior measure and simultaneously subtracting from the width of the following measure, so the effect is it feels like you are "moving" the barline itself. I see no reason why something similar shouldn't be possible for dragging systems up and down. I think that would be a reasonable feature request, and probably not hard to implement. Presumably there ought to be an option for how you want dragged systems to behave, so as not to upset those users who are currently happy dragging a system and having it "move" every system from there to the end of the piece. We could argue about which mode ought to be the default, but as long as there's an option I think everyone could be happy. (Me, I don't care, since I never drag systems anyway....) mdl _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
