At 10:27 PM 10/17/06 -0700, Mark D Lew wrote: >Ah! Sign of a true type-geek.
It was a surprise. And I now have many books about type and page design, including a brilliant new edition of Bringhurst's "The Elements of Typographic Style" that covers all aspects of digital typography. (And a copy of the 1951 edition of the US Government Printing Office's "Typography and Design" with its cover bound upside down -- no, it wasn't deliberate.) >I know that tracking (which I assume is what you mean by "kerning") is >available I did mean kerning. Finale doesn't appear to respect kerning pairs. For example, Times New Roman has hundreds of kerning pairs (over 100 in the original extended ASCII version, and nearly 1000 in the multiple-language version). But Finale doesn't respect them, so text looks pretty awkward. I've put side-by-side examples of the "WA" kerning pair in Pagemaker and Finale. You can see how Finale fails to kern them: http://maltedmedia.com/images/finale/kerntest-comparison.gif >Your example switching from Arial to Arial Narrow looks unattractive to >me, and I wouldn't want to resort to that. It isn't attractive because the Arial Narrow font is not a very nice job (nor is Arial for lyrics). I have some fonts with various levels of narrowness that work better, but that was a quick throw-together to make the point that it's possible. It's just the idea that one can improve the overall text-to-music balance & legibility a number of ways, and in some cases, there's no successful way under Finale but to use a narrower font for a word or two. >I think that's a fine formula. I wonder how much difference there >would be between our preferred settings for the various parameters. I would think a lot, but any one or two of them would be an improvement. Compared to how nicely made a page of music can be, it's a shame that the same level of sensibility can't be applied to the text. Dennis -- Please participate in my latest project: http://maltedmedia.com/waam/ My blog: http://maltedmedia.com/bathory/waam-blog.html Composer "buy local" bumpersticker: http://maltedmedia.com/people/bathory/bumpersticker.jpg http://www.cafepress.com/buy/80570307/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
