I agree with all of that, and let me just reiterate that the margin
ABSOLUTELY DOES NOT stay put. Changing the zoom level puts it back to
the left for certain, and there are other operates that do likewise.
I'm not on my Finale machine right now, so I can't enumerate the other
cases that torment me, but it happens all the time the way I work with
Finale. I typically work with a dozen or more staves, so I need to see
the names and I frequently rezoom and change staff sets, etc. About
every 90 seconds I find myself grabbing that scroll handle so I can see
the staff names.
This is not a 2006 issue. I think it has been a problem in every
release since 1998 at least.
David W. Fenton wrote:
On 5 Aug 2005 at 0:01, Darcy James Argue wrote:
In Scroll View, you can use the hand grabber to put the leftmost
barline anywhere you want, showing as much or as little of the staff
names as you desire. And once you've put it where you want it, it
stays there, no matter what else you do (that is, provided you don't
move left or right with the hand grabber tool again). If you want to
advance or retreat in Scroll View, on Mac, you can use cmd-page up
and cmd-page down to do so. (I'm sure there's a similar shortcut for
Windows.)
Also, it's only in large ensembles that one would really need to be
constantly reminded what the staff name is. I work mostly with music
in 3-6 parts, and I have no need whatsoever to see the staff names,
as I can tell which is which because of the staff groups (the
brackets plus the staves sharing a bar line).
However, I do think that there's something wrong with a program that
displays in one view onscreen in a manner that does *not* represent
the final printed view, yet draws some of its dimensions and settings
from placement in page view. By that, I mean scroll view's vertical
spacing from the top, which is controlled by the definition of the
where you place the staff. It seems to me that the display placement
ought to be something that is entirely independent of system layout,
or the scroll view should display more like the page view (e.g.,
showing percentage reductions, which would be very handy for me in
many cases where *not* showing it makes the music collide in scroll
view to the point of near unreadability), or it should be mostly
divorced from it.
I do think that hand grabbing and moving every time you open the
score is an annoyance that you shouldn't have to do, partly because
it's fairly fragile, in any event (especially vertically if you
scroll up or down or open, say, the MIDI tool window).
I think scroll view is the jewel in Finale's crown, the user
interface that makes Finale (nearly) unique, and MakeMusic could make
a very few very minor tweaks to it that would keep it well ahead of
the competition (don't think that Sibelius is not aware of the
drawbacks of their page-oriented view).
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