Creating a document with 205 songs

[sergiobn]

I want to create a Finale document with 205 songs. How do I separate each song in the whole document? How do I start a new one following the last I did?
I'm using Finale 2012 (Mac version).

[Skjalg]

Single instrument or score and parts?

[motet]

Measure numbers? Titles?

[MikeHalloran]

Also, does each song start on a new page or is it more like a most church hymnals where short and long pieces are fit together to minimize pages?

[motet]

To get you started, set the measure attributes of each new song to include "Begin a new staff system" and "Time signature: always show." And set the measure attributes of the last measure in the previous song to include "Hide cautionary clefs, key, and time signatures." If you want measure numbers or titles, there are other steps.

[sergiobn]

The document is for single instrument, with titles, measure numbers, and each song starts on a new page.
Thank you for your replies.

[BuonTempi]

Just use a Page Break to start the next bit of music on the next page. You'll want a separate measure number region for each piece.

Though, if every piece is separate, and starting on a new page, why not do it as separate documents, and then combine PDF files together? You could even do the page numbering on the PDF.

[motet]

205 documents?

[MikeHalloran]

205 documents?

Piece of cake.

My last Christmas book had 87 songs. I found it much easier to work each as a separate document and 'stitch' them together in Acrobat when I sent it to the printer. Being on a Mac, I could have done it in Preview but Acrobat made the job much faster.

In my case, numbering each of the .pdf files as part of the title lets me keep them organized. I assign page and song numbers in Acrobat or Photoshop Elements rather than in Finale. This makes reorganization very easy.

[motet]

It depends, I guess. If at some late date you decide on different page margins or a different font, it would be very inconvenient to open all those files and make the changes. I split big pieces into a few files, but only because Finale gets into trouble with very large files. I guess making 205 measure number regions might be a hassle, but I think there's a JW plug-in that will help.

[musikai]

(edit: your answers flew in while I was typing so slowly...)
I think there are different (dis-)advantages with both ways.
If you do all in a single document, then it's easy to apply page numbering and change style for all 205 songs alltogether.
But it may be difficult if you want to change the order.

If you do 205 single documents, you can combine all PDFs afterwards, and changing order is easy.
Though you have to find a PDF-Tool that can do the page numbering.(eg. Adobe Acrobat as mentioned above)
A free solution could be LOSA (in my signature). That uses LibreOffice and PDFtk and can create a Table-of-Contents automatically.

But having all songs as different documents may be a lot of work if you later decide, that you want another style eg. another font for the lyrics. Then you would have to change that in every single document.

[MikeHalloran]

Though you have to find a PDF-Tool that can do the page numbering.(eg. Adobe Acrobat as mentioned above)

There are many solutions from the free to the way too expensive (if Acrobat didn't make my day job easier, I would never have spent the $$$). On the Mac, I can use Preview, built into the OS. Photoshop Elements works nicely but is a bit time consuming.

How are you using Libre Office? I know there's a lot of functionality that I've not explored. Sure can't knock the price!
https://www.libreoffice.org/

I use it for opening MacWrite and AppleWorks docs (I'll save the rant about Apple not incorporating that into Pages for another day). Otherwise, as long as Office 2008 works great, I'm still using the devil I know.

[musikai]

Some day I just looked, what free solutions were there for creating (music) PDFs as I was away from my PC with all the obtained software and also didn't have access to serial numbers etc.

To be free and multiplatfom was the reason for LOSA. I use LibreOffice for all my normal office work and took the effort to make it use PDFtk for being able to merge in external PDFs. So in the doc you see a lot of "empty" pages with only pagenumbers where the PDFs will be merged in on export. This way you have a very small and responsable doc even on the slowest machine.
The details are all explained on the LOSA blog site.

[ebiggs1]

If it were me doing this I would certainly do it as 205 separate files. The issues of combining them afterwards will be far less stressful that making Finale keep track of 205 seperate songs. IMHO, of course. I did an Audition Excerpts where it had a dozen different and separate 'songs'. So, it can be done.

[MikeHalloran]

Some day I just looked, what free solutions were there for creating (music) PDFs as I was away from my PC with all the obtained software and also didn't have access to serial numbers etc.

To be free and multiplatfom was the reason for LOSA. I use LibreOffice for all my normal office work and took the effort to make it use PDFtk for being able to merge in external PDFs. So in the doc you see a lot of "empty" pages with only pagenumbers where the PDFs will be merged in on export. This way you have a very small and responsable doc even on the slowest machine.
The details are all explained on the LOSA blog site.

Thanks for that. I checked it out and read some of the blogs. I can't see using it for myself since Acrobat does it so well but it will certainly help others.