TIP: Changing lyric fonts with mixed fonts

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BuonTempi
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Joined: Fri Aug 20, 2010 8:59 am
Finale Version: Finale 27
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Post by BuonTempi » Fri Mar 17, 2017 7:28 pm

Here's something that I've spent the day wrestling with, which might prove useful to others.

It's very easy to change the lyric font in Finale -- this is best achieved with the Change Font plug-in. However, if you have mixed fonts in the same Verse, such as italics, or the elision slur from Engraver Font Set, then this can wreak havoc.

Now, you can copy the text from the Lyric Window, paste to another app, and perform text operations on the contents. I've done this frequently with the text editor BBEdit, for applying Smart Quote marks, and other manipulations of raw text, but not for formatting.

As chance would have it, I've just bought MS Word, and while trying to get my head round its oddities (for the first time in about 15 years), I managed to do a Find and Replace to formatting alone, finding one font and replacing with another, leaving Engraver in place. I could then paste this back into Finale, and bingo: brand new text font, maintaining the elision slurs and no capital I letters where they should be.

My first attempt was to try InDesign, but this didn't work pasting the text back: the characters got re-encoded to different glyphs on the clipboard. A bit odd.


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motet
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Post by motet » Sat Mar 18, 2017 12:38 am

I would look at Document Options/Fonts rather than trust the plug-in.

BuonTempi
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Post by BuonTempi » Sat Mar 18, 2017 8:52 am

Document Options doesn't affect existing Lyrics. The plug-in works very well.

Vaughan
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Post by Vaughan » Mon Mar 27, 2017 9:08 am

There's a Text Search & Replace function under Finale's edit menu which can do all this without the need for either plugins or external programs. Just leave the text fields blank but go to the style buttons. You'll get a window for choosing not only the font but also the style, and you can do the same with the replace button. Then, at the bottom of the window, deselect Search Everywhere and then deselect all the locations except for lyrics. An example: I have lyrics verses for different characters in an opera and their names are in Minion Bold so I can find them easily. Their sung text is in Minion Regular, but I wanted to change just these lyrics (i.e. not the names) to Minion Condensed in to get better music spacing. All I did was select Minion Regular and to replace it with Minion Condensed only in the lyrics. This effectively replaced all the Minion Regular lyrics with Minion Condensed and left the Minion Bold character names (as well as all iterations of Minion Regular everywhere else) alone.
Vaughan

Finale 3.2 - 26, Sibelius 4 - 7, Dorico 2.2
Tobias Giesen's plugins, full version, Robert Patterson plugins, Jari's plugins
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BuonTempi
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Joined: Fri Aug 20, 2010 8:59 am
Finale Version: Finale 27
Operating System: Mac

Post by BuonTempi » Mon Mar 27, 2017 1:00 pm

"Finale. There's always another way." :lol:

Thanks, Vaughan. I'd completely overlooked/forgotten about that.

birchbaydad
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Post by birchbaydad » Sat Apr 15, 2017 8:57 pm

Many thanks, Vaughn.

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