staff size

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musicus
Posts: 824
Joined: Sat Jul 26, 2003 11:12 pm
Finale Version: Finale v26
Operating System: Mac

Post by musicus » Fri Dec 09, 2016 7:08 pm

I can't seem to figure out how to get all staff sizes the same when I add a staff to a piano score. See meas.36-42 in the upper staff, it is larger than the piano staves below. But when I click the resize tool in front of it, it shows 83% just like the lower staves. What am I doing wrong? I get this problem frequently. (I have blanked out many measures purposely.)
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test.mus.zip
staff size
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Peter Thomsen
Posts: 6601
Joined: Fri Jul 25, 2003 6:47 pm
Finale Version: Finale v27.4
Operating System: Mac

Post by Peter Thomsen » Sat Dec 10, 2016 7:55 am

musicus wrote:I can't seem to figure out how to get all staff sizes the same when I add a staff to a piano score. See meas.36-42 in the upper staff, it is larger than the piano staves below. But when I click the resize tool in front of it, it shows 83% just like the lower staves. What am I doing wrong? …
What you are doing wrong, is that you - from within the Resize Tool - click “to the left of” the staff (your words: “in front of”).
The dialog box you get, is the dialog box Resize Page.
And the page scaling percentage is indeed 83 %.

Instead, click on the staff.
You get the dialog box Resize Staff which reveals that the upper staff is scaled to 100 % size, and the two lower staves are scaled to 90 %.

Finale has three different scalings that affect the staff size:
- Page Scaling
- System Scaling
- Staff Scaling
In your attached document you are using all three scalings.
Why?
I see no reason to use all three scalings in this document.
You can use all three scalings, but the layout calculations get complicated, and you must know what you are doing.

Furthermore, the settings in the document’s Page Format for Score are different from the settings in the existing systems.
Why?

If I were you, I would Keep It Simple:
Go to
Document menu > Page Format > Score…
and choose settings like these:
PageFormatForScore.jpg
PageFormatForScore.jpg (59.06 KiB) Viewed 1267 times
Next, switch to the Page Layout Tool, and Redefine Pages (all of the pages).
You will have to redo some of the layout work (like e. g. finetuning the system margins in some, specific systems).
But you will experience that the layout behaves much more predictably, and according to your expectations.

Tip 1:
When you are in the Resize Tool, use the context menu, and choose in the context menu what you want to resize.
In that way you can always be sure what you are resizing.

Tip 2:
The text block with the composer’s name (St. Saens) should probably
- be aligned Right (it is aligned Left)
- have its text justified Right (the text is justified Left)
Mac OS X 12.6.9 (Monterey), Finale user since 1996

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