On 12 Apr 2010 at 14:18, Darcy James Argue wrote: > On 12 Apr 2010, at 1:09 PM, David W. Fenton wrote: > > > What I'd like, though, is the ability to set the top and bottom > > staff and then have the ones in between spaced evenly automatically. > > Is that available in current versions of Finale? > > No -- that's one area where Sibelius has a significant advantage.
Well, I haven't played with the Sibelius demo for a while, but last time I did, I found it's options for sizing of systems and layout to be really restricted. To change one factor in the layout involved changing the whole style (or however they worded it). It seemed tied to terminology that was really old-fashioned, i.e., rastrals and such (tied to hand copying/engraving, instead of being computer-oriented) and not helpful. After posting I also thought of one of my annoyances with Finale, one that we are all probably so accustomed to that we don't even notice it any more, and that's the insistence on using negative numbers for distances from the top of a page. This is, if I'm remembering correctly, because PostScript calculates distances from the bottom of the page, so moving something down from the top is going in the opposite direction. This is one of those cases of what Joel Spolsky calls the "law of leaky abstractions" (Google it -- it's a great read), and I just don't see any excuse for letting negative numbers leak through to the user interface. It's just confusing and doesn't make the program itself any easier to maintain (the amount of code it would take to convert positive values back and forth to/from a dialog box is so trivial as to be insignificant). -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
