At 11:26 AM 11/8/2006, dhbailey wrote:
>I realized that about the data existing, so I had thought that the "Show
>in This Part Only" option would do exactly as you say in your final
>paragraph.
Okay, but your post just called it a 'This Part Only' option. I
wanted to be clear that this has to mean Show, not Create.
>Of course, the switching of the display wouldn't occur, but the end
>result would be the same -- an automated process to eliminate our need
>to do those five steps "manually."
Right. And I'm not saying that wouldn't be useful, but you are
talking about one specific case of a generic set of cases. The
generic case is 'show item in *some* parts only'. I'm not sure how
much programming time its worth to implement 'show in one part only'
when it doesn't help me much at all if I have an item I want to show
in two parts. Of course, if I want the same text box in two parts,
it's probably going to be in different positions on the page, if not
on different pages completely, so there's more going on here.
>I don't see how that would be so very difficult -- it simply switches
>whatever attributes are switched for that text block so that it only
>shows in the Flute part, for instance.
But it's a question of UI. If you implement 'Show in This Part Only'
as a menu item with a checkmark, then Finale needs to keep track not
just of the show/hide state for that particular part, but the
show/hide state for *every* part at once. For example, let's say I
check that item in the flute part. Then I go to the oboe part, where
the item is hidden, and I check 'Show'. Now I go back to the flute
part and right-click on the item. Finale knows that the item is
visible in the flute part, but in order to determine whether 'Show'
or 'Show in This Part Only' is checked when it draws the menu, it
needs to cycle through all the other parts to see whether the item is
visible in those parts. I'm not saying this is particularly
difficult, but it's more complicated than just adding the menu item.
(You could also implement 'Show in This Part Only' as a command menu
item with no checkmark, like Delete. That would avoid the above
problem, although there might be others.)
>And once that is automated, it should be a simple step (leap?) to
>allowing the use of staff lists just as we can do with expressions. so
>it would be possible to define a text block to show in all the woodwind
>parts, once we had defined such a staff list.
A measure-attached block, yes. But as I said above, I'm not sure how
useful this would be for page-attached blocks.
Aaron.
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