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Change Stubborn Text in Finale Quickly, Easily & Globally with Finale Script
In “Finale Text Sized, Placed & Styled – Document Options & the Category Designer“, we looked at how we can set up a Finale document’s overall font choices using the Document Options > Fonts and the Category Designer.
Changes to the Category Designer and Set Default Music Font affect your score in real time; however, some of the text objects in Document Options > Fonts can only be set prior to starting work on your score; problematic if your score is already completed, or you need to update your House Style after the fact.
So, since some of the Document Settings don’t update in real time in Finale, how do we change the font settings for text types such as Lyrics*, Measure Numbers*, Staff Names* and Text Blocks* which we have already entered?
This is where writing a few short lines of Finale Script can help you. Wait! You don’t have to be a computer programmer. It’s really simple, I promise. And it will save you hours of work over time with minimal effort up front.
Dolet 6 Music XML Plugins for Finale & Sibelius are now Freeware
Yup, that’s right: Just in time for Christmas, MakeMusic is offering the Dolet 6 Music XML plugin for both Finale and Sibelius on their website as a free download. Here’s the link:
http://www.makemusic.com/Products/MusicXML.aspx
Cool, right? But wait, what is a Sibelius plugin doing on the Finale website?
In case you missed the official announcement, on November 2, 2011, MakeMusic entered into an agreement to acquire selected assets of Recordare® LLC, the Internet music publishing and software company.
Under the terms of the agreement, MakeMusic purchased the MusicXML™ open format and Dolet® software technology, including copyrights, source code, and trademarks. MakeMusic also announced that the founder of Recordare and inventor of MusicXML, Michael Good, would join MakeMusic as the Director of Digital Sheet Music.
In case you want to read the official MakeMusic press releases, here they are:
Additionally, the Recordare site has more information about the future of Music XML.
Both Finale 2012 and Sibelius 7 already have decent Music XML integration built in, allowing you to import and export Music XML files for collaboration with others, or, in the case of Finale, for back saving to a previous version of Finale.
The Dolet 6 plugins use the latest Music XML 3.0 technology, with support for additional musical symbols and lots of other goodies, so even Finale 2012 and Sibelius 7 users will benefit. And, if you are using and earlier version of your notation software, such as Finale 2010 or Sibelius 6, it’s a huge step up, essentially giving users a comprehensive file exchange feature.
robert
Creating lyric elision slurs more easily in Finale 2011 and earlier
Elision slurs are the curvy ligatures used in many languages to connect two lyric syllables under one note.
In Sibelius, the process to show two elided syllables on the same note is very straightforward. Simply type _ (underscore) while creating lyrics to create an elision character.
Aside from the fact that Finale already uses the underscore character to create Word Extensions in real time (very useful), even as recently as Finale 2011, the process described in the User Manual to create an elision character is quite complicated: