Finale Forum

Finale 26, MacOS 10.14.4.

I am editing an instrumental part, earlier extracted from a score which contains a floating ossia measure in this part. As I said in an earlier post, the extracted part contained the floating ossia measure, but the measure was empty. I should still welcome responses to this, but in the meantime I have removed the empty ossia measure from the individual part I am working on and have created the relevant ossia anew in the extracted part itself. In doing this I encountered some strange phenomena, about which, too, I should very much welcome responses.

1. The User Manual says ‘In a scratch staff, enter the music…’. ’Scratch staff’, it turns out, simply means an additional staff which can later be hidden. In creating such a one via Staff Tool > New blank staves > Number of staves > 1, one is asked how far below the existing staff the new one should lie. I specified a distance of 1.5”, so as to make it easy to enter the alternative music. This had the effect of temporarily changing the number of measures on each page. And either this fact or some other had the bizarre effect of reducing the staff height for the whole of the part I was editing, starting from the page after the one including the ossia.

I was unable to correct this and had to start over again. This time, I set the distance below the original staff to 0.1” — just enough to distinguish the handle of the new staff from that of the existing one — and pulled down the new staff only in the system containing the measure in which to enter the ossia. After entering the ossia music, I dragged the scratch staff in that system back up to only 0.1” below the main staff. As a result the number of measures per page returned to the original, and the bizarre shrinking of subsequent staves was avoided.

Should this procedure not be described in the User Manual? Or is there a simpler way of preventing the subsequent shrinking of staves?

2. The ossia is an alternative version of the whole of measure 78. But when I arrived at the Ossia Measure Designer dialog, the small box at the top, where one chooses whether to attach the ossia to a page or a measure, said ‘Attach to measure 81’. Why? And why did this not change to 78 when I specified ’78’ for ‘Source Measure’ lower down in the dialog? In fact the ’81’ at the top could not be changed at all. This is very confusing. When, by contrast, I tried following the diktat of the ’81’ at the top and specified 81 as the Source Measure, the resulting ossia measure was completely misplaced.

I hope that there are simpler and less time-consuming ways of avoiding these ambiguities and errors. I should be most grateful for instructions, or for comments on the above.

The ossia feature is old and buggy. Most people now add an extra staff and write the ossia music there, hiding it everwhere else.

Thanks for this, Motet. The trouble with my present project, however, is that the page on which I wanted to place the ossia is so crowded and congested (something that I actually cannot do much about because of the need for page turns) that I wanted to place the ossia measure at the foot of the page, with asterisks to direct the player to the ossia. I have managed at last to have done this, but it took all day. I shall adopt your method in future whenever room for an ossia in situ is available. If you look at measure 78 in the — incompletely edited — attached file, you will see the problem of overcrowding.

Or, do the ossia in another document, export it as a graphic, and place it in your score.

Now, that’s a brilliant idea! Allows one freedom to place the ossia measure wherever it seems clearest. Thank you very much.

miker wrote:Or, do the ossia in another document, export it as a graphic, and place it in your score.

Yes.
The best would be:
- create regular music
- space it properly
- deselect automatic music spacing
- erase the regular music
- type ossia
- export ossia as graphic
- Undo undo... until regular music appears back
- Select music spacing
- place ossia graphic

I'm afraid I don't understand what this complication is all about. I tried the suggestion of using graphics, and it worked brilliantly — and simply. All I did was to create the ossia in a separate Finale file ('create', of course, means getting spacing, etc., right and reducing it to a single measure or however many measures are just sufficient to contain the ossia music), export it as a TIFF file and place it in my actual score. One of the advantages of this way of creating ossias (which is, however, shared with the method of creating an additional staff, etc.) is that (unlike by using the Ossia tool) it preserves slurs and other smart shapes in the ossia.