Spacing in pickup measure

[mark carlson]

I'm preparing the attached piece for publication. I wrote it and originally copied it in 1995, when either pickup measures were harder to do than they are now, or I didn't understand properly how to do them. So originally I entered them as just incomplete measures and dragged the barline to make it take up the right amount of space.

In re-editing, I decided to make the pickup measure a real pickup measure so that I could get the spacing automatically right, and I went through the process Finale has online for adding a pickup measure within a piece (there isn't anything I could find about changing an existing measure into a pickup measure, but it seems as if everything should work the same).

So far, so good, except when I come to spacing this measure properly in the parts: no matter what kind of music spacing I use, the pickup measure is inappropriately large. If I try moving its right barline to the left, the rest of that single-line system is not properly spaced.

I know that now, if you enter a pickup measure properly from the start, it automatically spaces it correctly. Is there any way I can get that to happen in this case? Or is there some other way I should be doing this to get it all to space correctly?

Thanks,

Mark Carlson
Finale 25.5
Mac OS 10.11.6

[Vaughan]

Most seasoned Finale users don't use the Pickup Measure function at all. Instead, it works better and more predictably to create a time signature with the value of the upbeat and set it to show as the time signature after the pickup measure. So, if you have a quarter note upbeat in 4/4 time, give the first measure a time signature of ¼ but set it to display as 4/4. Make sure you deselect Include in Measure Numbering in Measure Attributes.

[mark carlson]

Thanks, Vaughan. In fact, that's what I already did: the meter is 6/8 and the pickup is a dotted quarter, so I set the meter as 3/8 and set it to show differently as 6/8. Alas, it's still spacing it as if it is an entire measure of 6/8 instead of half that.

Mark

[Peter Thomsen]

Document menu > Document Options > Music Spacing

In the attached document the Minimum Measure Width is set to 90pt.
Try a lower value, like e. g. 36pt, or perhaps only 30pt.

[mark carlson]

Yes! That did the trick. Thanks much!

Mark