Finale Forum

Is it possible to change the color of note-heads for a selected notes? Like individual notes or a region. I see color choice attached only to pitch.

Since Finale doesn't quite have the control one would want on a note by note basis, I think most users suggest doing the "coloring" outside Finale with a pdf of the file that is then "doctored" in the program of choice. Since I don't have a need for that, I'll leave it to others to make suggestions.

Zuill

Thanks -- I won't count this Finale limitation, if it is one, as important. My situation is that I'm involved in Zoom meetings where I play a Finale score with one voice muted, so that the participants play along as music-minus-one. There are a few places where it is nice to draw their immediate attention, and this is the simplest, as other ways would be distractions.

Even with the pitch-dependent color coding, it would work if I could define a region to activate colors, but it looks like color is on or off for the entire doc.

Well, you do have colors for the 4 layers. Those can be changed, if you want. However, it's one color for the entire layer.

Zuill

Layer color -- near perfect, great idea.

montedoro44 wrote: ↑

Thu Sep 24, 2020 7:39 pm

Is it possible to change the color of note-heads for a selected notes? Like individual notes or a region. I see color choice attached only to pitch.

It's possible with a workaround, at least for the noteheads (no stems/beams/dots...). As graphics are the only items which can have any colour, one would need coloured notehead graphics which cover the existing noteheads, like this: These graphics could be used in an articulation definition which would place the graphics on top of the existing notehead, taking in account the stem direction.

I already did that by hand, but it's a tedious process. It could be automated by a JWLua script with a library which contains pre-defined noteheads in the most used colours. That's one of those projects residing on my hard drive on which I work occasionally, always asking myself if JWLua has a future and if there's a need for a function like that.

Individual note head colours.
Looking for this too.
I tried Inkscape which filled the bill perfectly till it decided to die on me / nothing back from developers.
Inserting note heads as graphics might be the only laborious alternative it seems.
I've tried a few other Apps similar to Inkscape but none do the job, or won't even import a .pdf without destructuring it completely.

Thanks for the "graphics" tip - we shel see

Why should anyone have to re-invent a way to do this? Finale can already color notes, but only based on pitch. Some other criterion could access the same subroutine.

There was a similar thread a little over 4 months ago and I replied in detail.
As this case is very similar to the current one, I am attaching a link and hope the information posted will give you a solution to deal with the problem.

However, let me clarify that this is only about coloring a specific notehead or even a larger region, but not an entire layer, for which there is another solution.

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=15361&p=91242&hilit=wess#p91242