Problems with margins

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sac727
Posts: 3
Joined: Sat Mar 14, 2020 11:40 pm
Finale Version: 2014
Operating System: Windows

Post by sac727 » Sat Mar 14, 2020 11:58 pm

Hi everyone,
I'm an advanced Finale user, but I'm 2 days into a migraine, I'm running into some formatting problems. I'm using Finale 2014 on a PC (I know it's old, I'm just broke while in school - new software is on the wish list!).

My dissertation has both an essay and music score, with required margins of 1.5 inches (left), and 1 inch (right, top, and bottom margins) because the graduate school needs to scan and archive on microfilm. Smaller margins will result in music getting chopped off at the edges when it gets scanned for the microfilm.

I'm having trouble getting the required margins without messing up my spacing. The directions for shrinking music overall results in perfectly printed music that ends up very close to the upper left corner of the page.

This is what I tried already (if I could have this, but adjust where it is located on the page, that would do it):
(https://usermanuals.finalemusic.com/Fin ... rging2.htm)

I've also tried messing with shrinking page size vs. shrinking page margin vs. shrinking system margin, and combinations of these. Maybe I'm missing the best option. There's just way too much music to change the spacing several measures at a time, especially considering that I'll have to reformat all over again after my defense for the final version submitted to ProQuest.

To give you a better sense of the final project, I'll be exporting documents from Finale and from MS Word into PDFs, merging the pdfs in sodapdf (because Adobe's "portfolio" feature doesn't work properly yet), and then adding page numbers in Adobe Acrobat DC Pro.

I'm hoping for a systematic solution because I have 8 Finale Files to deal with.

Thanks so much for all of your help.

Sarah


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motet
Posts: 8227
Joined: Tue Dec 06, 2016 8:33 pm
Finale Version: 2014.5,2011,2005,27
Operating System: Windows

Post by motet » Sun Mar 15, 2020 12:01 am

It might be easiest to do whatever shrinking needs to be done in Acrobat. I can imagine if you've done any manual spacing that it might not survive margin changes or shrinking in Finale.

sac727
Posts: 3
Joined: Sat Mar 14, 2020 11:40 pm
Finale Version: 2014
Operating System: Windows

Post by sac727 » Sun Mar 15, 2020 12:24 am

Hi motet,
Thanks for posting. I agree with you, but couldn't get it to work.

I originally wanted to deal with the margins in Acrobat. I wanted a clean, simple way to add margins to everything and I thought Acrobat would do it.

Acrobat easily adds margins to the pdf exported from MSWord, but Acrobat wasn't able to make any margin change at all on the pdf exported from Finale. I think the issue is that they tried to keep a powerful format where Acrobat could recognize material embedded in the pdf - for a word document, it makes one "box" around the content, but for the score, it tries to "box" every element in the score. I think it's probably an Acrobat bug, but it can't perform basic features on the pdf pages exported from Finale.

Sarah

sac727
Posts: 3
Joined: Sat Mar 14, 2020 11:40 pm
Finale Version: 2014
Operating System: Windows

Post by sac727 » Sun Mar 15, 2020 12:29 am

So far, what seems like it might work (*might* because I might have problems once I bring the files into Finale) is this:

Page Layout/ Edit Page Margins (change left side to 2 inches, which is larger than the required 1.5 inch, to compensate for the fact that Finale measures margins from the music, not the instrument names). Change right, top, and bottom margins to 1, as required by my school.

Page Layout / Resize Staff Systems (System Reduction)
Resize 83%
Resulting System 70% (because 8.5 inch width on standard paper, minus 1 inch for right margin and 1.5 inch for left margin, and 6/8.5 is about 70%).

Make sure "hold margins" and "resize vertical space" boxes checked.

This does reduce vertical spacing, but doesn't make the score itself look distorted.

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N Grossingink
Posts: 1786
Joined: Mon Dec 19, 2016 2:50 pm
Finale Version: 27.3
Operating System: Mac

Post by N Grossingink » Sun Mar 15, 2020 11:25 am

I would:

√ Make PDFs of the Finale pages using the Finale Graphics Tool.
√ Set up a page using a page layout app that has the specified margins in place. I imagine something as unversal as Microsoft Word would do the job,
√ Import the Finale PDFs into the page layout app and resize the imported PDF to stay within the margins.
√ Resave the file as a PDF.
N. Grossingink
Educational Band, Orchestra and Jazz Ensemble a specialty
Sample: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pFF5OeJDeLFGHMRyXrubFqZWXBubErw4/view?usp=share_link


Mac Mini 2014 2.6 Ghz, 8Gb RAM
OSX 10.15.7
Finale 2012c, 25.5, 26.3, 27.3

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