Thanks to everyone (Mark, Andrew, Christopher, Darcy, Jari, Éric, Barbara, Richard, David... anyone else? What an amazing group!) for the excellent and detailed layout suggestions.
This discussion has been *extremely* gratifying, as the (un)ease of layout has plagued me for a long time -- the need to get the job done quickly and clearly and in time for the only performance a piece will likely ever have in my lifetime. (Although I have to say that putting my scores on line has resulted in several welcome & unexpected performances.) It seems that I use the relatively unpopular graphical method of adjustment. Even so, I will take a look at the TGTools Staff List Manager ... but TGTools is often opaque to me. I bought TGTools to do a few things, but rarely use it; it's been too difficult to learn "on the fly" -- which is when I usually need it. I'm not much for practicing. :) I have *certainly* missed the additional procedures provided with optimization. Optimization is something I haven't used in several years because it was, to my mind, nothing more than a "remove empty staves" tool. My music doesn't contain enough empty staves that there was any layout gain from doing that. I didn't know optimization opened the door to other features -- so let me heap on additional thanks for that information. It was also surprising to learn that the systems are related by distances, and not identified by their independent placement. That explains some of the trouble I'd had over the years. Finale's choice of structure, subject of another current topic, has (in my mind) often hobbled the program's fluidity. The choice of the measure=frame basis has made any music that requires temporal flexibility to be dealt with as a workaround. Yes, I know that measure-free music, staggered barlines, etc., remain a niche in the overall body of music. But it would be nice... The last thing is the Sibelius vs. Finale discussion. I haven't used Sibelius, but I would say that I can't imagine how a new user could make sense of Finale with all its plugins. I have tried to organize the plugins by function (darn you Tobias for not letting me drag and drop your modules where I would use them, and delete the rest!), but this plugin situation just looks like a house of cards ready to collapse. Tangential: Trying to outline a layout order procedure came up a few year ago when I was helping to coordinate the user manual for Graphire Music Press -- I asked users for flow charts, verbal descriptions, sketches or anything to summarize what they did for layout. There was only one person who had a consistent procedure at all, but it made too many assumptions about user behavior and knowledge to be useful. Graphire is definitely a composer-hostile environment, so I never took to it. But it does have a lot of user interface components that Finale could learn from -- including doing *everything* in page layout mode, with layers and clean hierarchies, and having ownership shown (for components such as slurs and articulations). Because of its advanced reflow methods, Finale's scroll view can be emulated simply by making the page temporarily, say, 100 feet long. If any program would make you long for an overhaul of Finale's UI, Graphire would be it. But it's terrible if you're trying to compose into it ... it's really a publishing program. Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
