Music Spacing Questions

[mark carlson]

Can anyone help me understand why the spacing in measures 12 & 13 in the attached piece is so bad? There are two problems:

1. m. 12, beat 3, the A in the left hand of the piano in layer 2 is not lined up with the chord--it's too far to the right;
2. m. 13, beat 3, piano left hand, there is a direct collision between the A—last note of the triplet in layer 1—and the flat in layer 2.

There is plenty of room for all of this in these measures, so there is no good reason for these errors--at least, none that I can think of. Yes, of course, I can move those things by hand, but I'd rather not have to, and besides, I am curious as to why it's happening. What am I missing?

Thanks,

Mark

[motet]

In measure 12, the A is offset so it doesn't collide with the layer 1 B, but I'm not sure why it's moved so far. In measure 13, the flat is moved left to avoid collision with the sharp, but it doesn't have to be that far over. You can moved it manually to the right.

Finale could do better, but it doesn't, so you may have to resort to manual tweaking.

[mark carlson]

OK, thanks! I was hoping Finale could do better. In the meantime, I changed the Ab to a different note.

[George Holloway]

Yes, I would really like to know why Finale, a not inexpensive, supposedly professional grade music notation software program, can't do better. PLEASE someone from Finale tell me what the technical problem is with the coding. I beg you. I need to understand why life is still so hard for Finale users. We have autonomous cars now, why don't we have music notation programs that can avoid collision of noteheads automatically? I'm asking seriously.

[RMK]

We have autonomous cars now, why don't we have music notation programs that can avoid collision of noteheads automatically? I'm asking seriously.

We do.
It's just not Finale.

[miker]

We have autonomous cars now, why don't we have music notation programs that can avoid collision of noteheads automatically? I'm asking seriously.

Autonomous cars have collisions, too.

In any case, adding seconds to the Avoid Collisions With section of document Options > Music Spacing helped. All that was left was the vertical collision with the eight rest, and the accidental. I don't think that's so horrible.

[zuill]

For 25 years, I recall very little that Finale can't do. Very powerful, with the most user control of probably any program available. I'm glad it's not autonomous.

Zuill

[BuonTempi]

For 25 years, I recall very little that Finale can't do. Very powerful, with the most user control of probably any program available. I'm glad it's not autonomous.

Finale does very little: but it lets me do a lot.

Personally, I would welcome ANY improvement in Finale that reduces the work I have to do. Manually moving every occurrence of noteheads in different voices that need separating is something I could happily do without. Same for vertical collision adjustment and spacing. I certainly don't rejoice that Finale lets me do tedious manual work, when CPU cores go idle.

[ebiggs1]

Finale has some bugs that is for sure. And, I suspect they are either not possible to fix or too expensive to fix. Otherwise why would MM not do it. On the other side, I have no doubt there is very little in music that Finale can't do if you only know how or can figure out how.

The ability of Finale to use plugins is a huge deal. Not to mention the smarter than I guys that create them.