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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