On Jan 30, 2008, at 11:30 AM, Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote:
Christopher Smith wrote, on 1/30/2008 10:19 AM:
I can't imagine dealing with all the weird Finale behaviours that
a score of this intricacy must uncover.
I can list them. :) And you can ask jef. He does work much harder
and far superior to mine.
Heh, heh, I know! Jef is astonishing! He also doesn't complain much,
except about things not staying where they are put (which annoys me
too, so I can only imagine the kind of frustration he experiences
with his highly precise placements.)
I want to check out some of these behaviours you listed. Dancing
articulations is well-known and still present in 2008a. The selection
tool issues seem to be worked out in 2008a, but I will check the
specifics you mentioned.
The shape designer WILL NOT place things correctly, and the amount of
error changes according to view and staff size (I stopped checking
system size and page size, as the first two are enough to render the
tool unusable for me.) Anyone who is affected by this (and even those
who aren't!) are encouraged to open a case with MakeMusic about it,
as the impression I got is that they don't hear about it very often.
The shape designer used to be the one thing that could save you from
Finale's shortcomings in other areas, but if IT doesn't work, then we
have no way out of many problems that come up.
General program stability seems to be improved with 2008a as well. I
remember 2007 getting buggier and buggier as my work session
progressed, so that I would have to close and restart every few
hours. That is not completely gone, but it happens much less in 2008a.
I'll be back.
Christopher
The score layout was done first, so everything was entered in page
view (except for some smart shapes that crossed pages) at 400%
magnification.
The meta-tools really keep the problems down in a score like this.
But some issues (this is Finale 2007):
Finale blocks access to the Windows taskbar. Clicking on the
taskbar or using CTL-ESC to bring up documents doesn't work, nor
does ALT-TAB to switch applications. Finale has to be minimized
(this is Windows XP SP2) to access other programs. The behavior is
erratic, and seems to depend on in what order Finale was last
accessed.
Jumping articulations just make me nuts. Move-redraw, move-redraw,
move-redraw, move-redraw, move-redraw...
The selection tool locks up when choosing several shapes one after
another. Another tool has to be selected, and then the selection
tool chosen again.
On one of the pages, the selection tool will only select the same
one item. No matter what is clicked, it only selects that one.
Never did figure it out, but it meant not using the selection tool
on that page.
The shape designer box has got a new bug (to me). When opening at
400%, the object is displaced by several inches. It has to be
closed and re-opened. (The custom glisses were done in shape
designer.) This behavior is linked to how Finale handles two
displays; instead of, like most applications, putting dialog boxes
on the primary display, it splits them down the middle of the two
displays. Things on the secondary display behave weirdly, and
dragging the dialog onto the primary display (now *there's* a time-
saver) doesn't always work and the whole dialog has to be re-started.
The custom line tool won't drag after a while. The shape has to be
de-selected and re-selected. This was especially a pain with those
lines that crossed other items demanding several small segments of
broken lines.
The program won't compile embedded images, meaning it had to be
printed to PDF, causing that irregular screen display. This
continues to be a big issue for me.
After a while, some tools stop working, and the program has to be
left and re-started.
An issue I couldn't take time to solve: When 'beam over rests' is
selected, the end with the secondary beam stub will always go over
the rests of the same value, which can be ugly. I can't figure out
a way to move just the stub back a little bit.
Tuplets over barlines remain a bear.
Yeah, that's all I can think of. :)
Dennis
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