On 24 Feb 2005 at 10:13, Jari Williamsson wrote: > David W. Fenton wrote: > > > What I *would* support is if the text expression dialog's text box > > at the top were instead replaced with the standard Finale text > > editor. Then you could put anything in the text expression that you > > could put into the text editor, and the user interface would be > > exactly the same in both places. Text expresssions would then be > > text blocks with additional expression-only properties added to > > them. > > This is exactly how expression works in Fin2004 and later.
I thought I'd remembered that you could now mix fonts, and that was probably the easiest way for them to implement it (and certainly the best from an end user's point of view). I really can't see any utility to collapsing the different kinds of text into a single interface, though, because each different kind has different properties that have different effects on the music. Text blocks have a whole set of properties that are page-based (and have no effect on performance), while text expressions are measure- or note-attached. So, even the positioning properties of the two types are *completely* different. I see no clearer way to distinguish text used for different purposes than to have different UIs for editing them. Now, I'd have no objection whatsoever if there were an additional interface that allowed you to edit all text in a piece, no matter what kind (text blocks, text expressions, staff/group names, etc.). That would be quite useful, especially if you could select multiple items of disparate types and change their text attributes as a group. But that's just an additional interface, not a removal of the old interface, which to me makes more sense as it is organized according to *musical* logic (the tools that should be combined are expressions and articulations, and then add a property to the new combined object that determines whether its performance attributes act upon just the single note (i.e., articulations) or from the insertion point forward, as with expressions). The result of that would be that you could create expressions with pre-defined vertical positioning, just like articulations. Of course, I also seem to remember something about pre-defined vertical positioning having been added in a recent version of Finale, so I may be late with the idea. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
