On Jul 13, 2004, at 12:56 PM, dhbailey wrote:
I really don't care what composers want to write - if it makes sense to them, let them write it. If it makes sense to others, it'll get played, and if it doesn't, it won't get played.
BUT, I would love to see a feature added to Finale's time signature tool, whereby we can DEFINE the Use Different Time Signature For Display. It would have the ability to use any numbers (the digits 0 to 9 in any combinations which fit the traditional number-over-number) or note type.
I completely concur. I would further suggest that the plus sign be allowed as well as numerals. For that matter, I see no reason why they shouldn't allow you to type any character you want and faithfully render it in whatever font has been chosen for the time signature font. If 90% of them come out wanky-looking, so what? That's the user's problem for entering something other than a number. It doesn't hurt anything, just as it doesn't hurt anything that in the current Finale I could choose a clef for a notehead if I wanted to.
It would also be nifty if there were a mechanism for adding large parentheses around a whole piece (top and bottom) of time signature, but I suppose that would be a little harder to implement.
While I believe that non-power-of-two denominators are a fairly specialty demand, other irregular time signatures like, say, "7/8 (3+4/8)" aren't so rare. The fact that Finale doesn't have an easy mechanism to allow the user to create irregular time signatures is a fairly significant shortcoming. They could accomplish a lot by simply expanding the "use a different time signature for display" to give the user a little collection of building blocks from which a wide variety of permutations could be made.
One possibility would be that the "use a different time signature for display" be expanded to provide three different options. The first would be the current scheme, including its confusing but useful "composite" option; the second would be two text inputs in which one types any string of characters for the numerator and the denominator; and the third would bounce you to the shape designer where you can cook up whatever you like. In any case, Finale treats the resulting image as a time signature and displays and spaces it accordingly.
mdl
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