Finale Forum

Yes, but he is dead and can't buy the plug-in anymore

I thought it was common to say that if a string quintet had 200 measures, the composer didn't mean 40 measures spread to five instruments, but five times 200 measures. And no big band composer ever told me that his new piece was 2000 measures, while it was only 120 measures for each big band instrum...

Michel R E wrote: the plugin has quite a learning curve for someone like myself, I even find it difficult to figure out good numbers to insert in Finale's placement options for articulations and expressions... I think you shouldn't worry too much about every parameter/option in the beginning. The de...

>the directions for the plugin seem to imply that as little manual placement of items should be done to a file before using Perfect Layout. If you want to save as much time as possible, do as little as you can. You can, of course, do lots of manual adjustments before the plug-in, but then you won't ...

Yes, there is a forum on the Elbsound.studio homepage ("Forum"). https://elbsound.studio/forum But it is currently still empty - it was just opened this week. During the beta test we used email only. It's good for suggestions though. For technical questions/problems/comments send a mail to Elbsound....

You must use Pori Chords ASC Std as chord symbol font (and not Pori Chords Std and not Pori PlainChords Std). But I think it's not possible to get the same look as in Sibelius without updating the slash symbol boundaries and placement in the font. You can adjust the symbol angle and positioning in a...

Perfect Layout for Finale also has a stacking algorithm that uses a more complex approach. - articulations are stacked by their "natural" order (i.e. bow markings on top, followed by fermatas, etc.), not by the order in the articulation dialog. Both have advantages/disadvantages. Perfect Layout isn'...

v2.0 will be a paid update. But there will be intermediate updates. We have had 20 updates in the last 9 months. Here is the history file since last November - we have been very busy: https://elbsound.studio/perfect-layout/History.txt Usually every week little things go into the plug-in. The more in...

Check out the examples and video section, there you will find many examples - also for text blocks. Measure text should be no problem, though I think it is an object type that is not moved itself. But it is taken into account for other collisions. Here is a real-time video of how two large measure-a...

>Is there a way to trigger autosave? That would be better in case of a crash, in which case Finale would restore it automatically when you restarted. AFAIK it's not possible. At least not in JW Lua, maybe in the Finale PDK. What would be possible - theoretically -, is that the plug-in duplicates the...

All settings can be changed manually after the plug-in. The only element that can be locked in Finale are systems. If you apply the plug-in with the "Reflow across systems/pages/Remove System Lock" settings (from Finale's preferences), this setting will automatically change to "Maintain System Locks...

Would you do "tie + slur" as standard notation? It's not a glitch, it's a feature that duplicate tie/slurs are corrected. Slurs that were mis-used as ties are also converted to ties. Please read the "Feature Overview" that corresponds to the image. Each measure is explained. You can read it online (...

Look at the user dialogs: you can deactivate lots of algorithms: https://elbsound.studio/perfect-layout/settings.php And if there are reasons (that are valid for multiple users) to be able to deactivate more algorithms and still use the plug-in as a general layout plug-in, we will add more deactivat...

Can't save doesn't make sense. Because this is a Finale feature that we can't disable. Another solution might be an alternative "purchase by paying over several months" model that you can cancel after one month and thus will only cost you very little. If you keep it running for e.g. 12 months, the p...

Yes, a demo would be great. Unfortunately it's rather difficult (or better: impossible?) to create a secure time-limited demo in JW Lua.
But we are still thinking about solutions...

Yes, it will work with all Maestro-compatible fonts , but it might show a warning message that it doesn't know the font and assumes that it is Maestro-compatible. The font engine currently has direct support for nearly 500 music fonts (of which ca. 400 are non-compatible music fonts). For example al...

The plug-in is now available for Finale/Windows (2014, 2014.5, v25 and v26):
https://elbsound.studio/perfect-layout/

No, it automatically installs for all Finale versions that it finds on the computer. If there are multiple Windows users installed on one computer, every Finale version of every user will get the plug-in installed in its plug-ins folder. You can also run multiple plug-ins at the same time. For my te...

You can use it in FInale 2014-v26. Thanks for the hint. I have updated it now.

The "400 measures limit" in Silver400 means:
A file with more than 400 measures will not be processed. If you delete all measures above 400, it will be processed.

Today after more than 5 years of development I have released the plug-in Perfect Layout v1.0 for Finale/Windows . It is the most comprehensive plug-in ever written for Finale. The plug-in includes more than 300.000 lines of code, has native support for more than 450 music fonts, features more than 1...

>but hits in a drum part aren't discussed in either. You mean "hits on a percussion staff"? Because the first blog article explains it exactly for a standard staff which can also be used for a drum part. Only the slash staff style is missing, but that's one simple step at the end. Are you sure that ...

There are also two similar tutorials on the MakeMusic Finale blog:
https://www.finalemusic.com/blog/quick- ... hmic-hits/
https://www.finalemusic.com/blog/jazz-a ... drum-cues/
https://usermanuals.finalemusic.com/Fin ... sion11.htm

The technical problem is the "double squiggle" symbol in Maestro.
If you use a single squiggle symbol instead, you won't have this problem.
This is described, demonstrated and solved here:
https://elbsound.studio/elbsound-music- ... p#arpeggio

It would be possible to achieve with the JW Lua plug-in. But I don't know if such a script already exists.

Jan
https://elbsound.studio

Could it be that this is a Mac-only issue? On Windows I didn't couldn't reproduce this problem (tested in Fin2014 and Fin2014.5): the GoldenAgeText font has no alignment problem in staff names or text blocks. I only noticed that Finale/Windows has the common "Font Name" problem as it suggests "Golde...