Craig,
Thank you for sharing these thoughts. You have made much more progress
with Dorico than I have made, so I didn't feel qualified to respond.
But I'm glad you were able to make the comparisons.
I know that becoming better acquainted with Dorico is in my imminent
future, but most of the projects I've been working on lately have had
short timetables so learning a new software hasn't been possible.
soon . . .
Thanks,
David
On 1/26/2019 5:01 PM, Craig Parmerlee wrote:
Here are some observations about each of the plug-in examples. Let me
stipulate that the Finale plug-ins might provide some unusual visual
results that aren't directly matched by Dorico, so I am not claiming
equivalence on any of these.
1. Copy arbitrary material regardless of barlines, etc. This is
inherent in Dorico, and I think you would find this far more productive
in Dorico. Dorico does not provide any drag-and-drop, but the cut and
paste model is extremely powerful. It even allows 1-to-many pasting,
and pasting to discontinuous staffs and so on. Also there is a very
powerful capability where you can select any material, press "R" and it
automatically duplicates the material placing it immediately to the
right of the selection, which still expressing everything correctly with
no touch-up required.
2. Mass relink. This is inherent in Dorico. Moreover, Dorico seems to
make better assumptions about when to automatically reflect score
changes in parts and vice versa.
3. Autocreate MM rests. This is always automatic. You never "create"
any MM rests. It is inherent. There are some options for visual
appearance.
4. Multiple sets of not spacings. I am not aware of anything line this
in Dorico. Of course you can edit the parts directly to apply any
spacing you need.
5. Designate certain text as titles. There is only "text" and "system
text" in Dorico. There is no hierarchy of text objects, such as an
outline mode in a word processor. However, you have a great deal of
control over the formatting of any text object and you can freely copy
and reuse any of your text items. So if you have a text object
formatted as a "title", you can copy that anywhere else you need a
similar title to appear. Moreover, Dorico has a higher level of
abstraction for these situations. Your file can consist of multiple
"flows", which are like movements. And each flow can have a title, with
options how and when to display those titles.
6. Mass align hairpins. There is no mass alignment, but if you have a
4-bar passage, you can enter the dynamic as "Fp<mp>ppp" and Dorico will
enter that dynamic as a group that is all aligned. And if you copy that
group to other staves, they will be aligned (taking in to account the
collisions). So if you enter it properly, you never need to go back and
fix it. Dorico moves the groups around (maintaining the alignment) as
needed even if the music changes to create a new collision.
7. Various fixes. Most of these situations just don't happen in
Dorico. And you have complete control over the rhythmic position and
length of every object, so anything like this is very easy to fix.
8. Movements. See 5 above. it is far more elegant than in Finale. And
flows have other uses. I often keep extra flows in my score as
scratchpads or two different versions of a harmonization until I am sure
I have it right. I just did a big band chart that has a 16-bar a
cappella fugue in 4 voices. That was very tedious as I am not a fugue
person, so I created a separate flow just for those 16 bars. That
16-bar flow was reduced to only 4 players plus a chord playback staff so
I could get all the counterpoint working. Once that was right, I coped
those 16 bars to the main flow and expanded the voices to let that
section build over the 16 bars. This is all very straightforward under
Dorico. You can certainly do something like that with Finale
programming a view, but I'd probably put the scratchpad in a completely
separate MUSX file. Either way works, but it is much faster in Dorico
because all of the above is just a few mouse clicks in setup mode.
9 Transfer page payout. There is no template capability in Dorico,
which is a bit of a weakness. However, if you have a score set up the
way you like it, you can easily copy that and use that as the basis for
your new project. And you can do that after the fact by exporting your
flow(s) from one score and importing the flow(s) into the score that has
the layout your want. And as far as parts go, Dorico has a "master
page" structure where you can develop a master page that can be used by
any number of parts. This area of Dorico is rather complicated, but
looks very powerful. I haven't used it much.
10. TG Tools. No questions on this one.
11. Proportionately scale staffs. I don't know about this. There are
lots of options in Dorico for this kind of thing, but I don't know that
any of them do what you want here.
12. Modeless plug-in problem. I don't know about that. There aren't
any plugins in Dorico. You can, however, do hot key assignments for any
of hundreds of commands. And there are folks who are using the "Stream
Deck" keypad to really boost their productivity. I haven't done that
yet. That's not a direct replacement for plug-ins, but enables a
different kind of workflow that may enable even greater productivity
than you get from plug-ins.
I'm not trying to sell anybody on Dorico. I am only trying to explain
how it differs from the architecture of the older programs. It really
is a different experience. You would develop a different workflow, and
anybody deeply invested in the plug-in style of operation may find that
difficult to change. To me, it boils down to the apparent fact that
Finale is not going to be improved very much from this point. If
Finale is doing what one needs, then stick with it. Dorico is radical in
some respects. It isn't for everybody.
On 1/26/2019 10:04 AM, Robert Patterson wrote:
Besides the Patterson Beams, TGTools, and JW plugins included in
Finale, I
use 3rd party plugins to
1. Copy arbitrary combinations and patterns of expressions, dynamics,
articulations, and other elements in a repeated fashion, independent of
barlines, both vertically and horizontally.
2. Mass Relink, which can relink the score to the part's settings or vice
versa.
3. Autocreate multimeasure rests with many more options than Finale has,
including the ability to add extra space for clef changes or force the
creation of multimeasure rests in places where Finale won't create them.
4. Maintain multiple sets of note spacing settings per measure region and
per part. Then a single invocation of the plugin spaces the music
according
to those settings, taking into account the current part. Even better, by
means of a nifty trick that someone suggested on this list. the
plugins can
get tighter spacing with ledger lines than Finale does.
5. Designate certain text expressions as titles (i.e., for movement
titles)
or footnotes or headnotes. Then invoke a plugin than finds them in every
part and correctly positions them. This is *way* better workaround than
Finale's Page Titles for this kind of thing.
6. Mass align and move dynamics and hairpins. (TGTools Align/Move is
included in Finale but the version in the full TGTools is much more
powerful.)
7. Quickly repair common screwups in Finale, such as restoring lost note
spacing from a saved copy or moving expressions and endpoints that have
lost their notes due to Speedy edits.
8. With one simple menu click, start a new movement. That is, show full
names, indent the first system, restart the measure numbers from 1,
twiddle
the measure bits in the current and preceding measure as needed. With one
menu click that has no dialog box.
9. Transfer page layout from one document to another and/or one part to
another and/or within a single document or part. Including (optionally)
system baselines for expressions and lyrics.
10. I recently discovered the JW Change plugin that can do so much that I
have only begun to digest all the ways in which I might use it.
11. TGTools has an option to proportionally expand or contract the staves
in a system. This saves me hours, especially on large multistaff scores
like orchestra scores. Then once you have that system perfectly fitted to
your margins, you can copy the staff layout to page after page and make
only minor tweaks thereafter.
12. Fix the focus problem with modeless plugin windows on Mac (Fin25.4
and
higher).
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