Eric Fiedler wrote:
As I understand it, the old engravers of yesteryear used one set of spacings for a whole piece or movement, which _did_ require a lot of calculations before hammering in the first note punch, but which produced results which are easy to read and in addition exude a wonderful kind of harmonious "rightness" that has a lot to do with the overall graphical balance between black and white on the page. Or am I being too fussy here? I'd be interested in your take on the subject — or anybody's take, for that matter.
If you look at the spacing examples at page 37 of Herbert Chlapik's "Die Praxis des Notengraphikers" and try to achieve those examples in Finale, you'll see that to "translate" the rules he uses for old-fashion plate engraving/spacing, you'd need to apply many different kinds of Finale spacing in different measures, mainly because the "spacing languages" are different between Finale and hand engraving. I agree with you that different spacing within a Finale document can sometimes look odd, but it mostly appears when similar kind of measures have been treated differently.
Apart from the basic algorithms, another big difference is that Finale currently can not judge what true "collision" is, while an eye has no problem judging that. An when speaking of finetuning ("Der optische Ausgleich", page 63-64 in that same truly excellent book) Finale has no support at all, although it's quite easy to train the eye in spotting those instances to fix the spacing (with beat chart editing and a little automation by TGTools).
Best regards, Jari Williamsson _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
