Finale Forum

Please tell me I'm not being stupid.
I just spent who-knows-how-many hours engraving a 170 page piece. The size I chose was B4.

When I imported to the document to InDesign for further editing, the page was too large for the file. Puzzled, I checked the page size window in finale and saw this: 257,5mm x 363,9mm.

However, a quick Google search and InDesign say that a B4 size is 250mm x353mm. Is the template in Finale wrong? That's a major letdown that will cost me loads of work if true.

I don't think it's a "template," per se (rather a canned choice in the page format dialog), but it sure looks like it's wrong.

Can you perhaps reduce everything to 97% of original?

Finale seems to be providing the Japanese B4 size, rather than the ISO B4.

As it happens my usual music printing firm here, the Scottish Music Centre, has a physical printer which is Japanese, so the B4 paper they buy is correct for that. Either way, as Motet suggests, a modest % reduction will reduce the Japanese B4 to the ISO size.

A further thought: maybe this size is not directly from Finale itself but relates to whatever printer your computer usually connects to. Do you have a Japanese printer, such as an Epson?

motet wrote: ↑

Sat Feb 17, 2024 5:52 am

I don't think it's a "template," per se (rather a canned choice in the page format dialog), but it sure looks like it's wrong.

Can you perhaps reduce everything to 97% of original?

Unfortunately I have specific requirements on space, point size, thickness and margins I need to keep. Besides, it's not an exact ratio, even if it's very close. Oh well!

David Ward wrote: ↑

Sat Feb 17, 2024 9:59 am

Finale seems to be providing the Japanese B4 size, rather than the ISO B4.

As it happens my usual music printing firm here, the Scottish Music Centre, has a physical printer which is Japanese, so the B4 paper they buy is correct for that. Either way, as Motet suggests, a modest % reduction will reduce the Japanese B4 to the ISO size.

A further thought: maybe this size is not directly from Finale itself but relates to whatever printer your computer usually connects to. Do you have a Japanese printer, such as an Epson?

No, it's definitely from Finale itself, in the dialog options on page size! It's not an issue of printing to PDF, which uses existing printer configuration. Anyway, I don't have a Japanese Printer to begin with. Fun theory though!

Yes: officially the ISO B4 is 250mm by 353mm, while the Japanese is 257mm by 364mm. The proportions are identical, as are those of A4 and A3.

That Finale's figures seem slightly out for the Japanese is probably related to Finale's way of rounding up or down, and would be unlikely to make any realizable difference when printing a score with normal margins.

I usually do everything on a computer in notional A4, even when I want it to be printed to B4. I then let the SMC know the size to which it should be printed so they can make the correct % adjustment. It is however, a somewhat convoluted process calculating the stave size for B4 if one is working on the computer in A4. (If I remember correctly, it involves the fourth root of 2 and similar arithmetical convolutions.)

Finale takes its paper sizes from the pagesizes.txt file.

On a Mac, that's in the USER Library/Application Support/MakeMusic/Finale 27/Configuration Files/

Sure enough, B4 is given as: (where c is centimetres. You can use all the units that Finale understands in any dialog, e.g. e, i, c, m, p, pt).

You can change that to:
(The other values are margins.)

Interestingly, the B5 size is correct at 176 x 250mm. (Japanese B5 is 182 x 257mm).

Also: moving A4 to the top of the list will make it the default in the Setup Wizard and Page Format dialogs. The order in the drop-down list matches the order in the txt file.
You'll need to restart Finale to get the updated values.

http://usermanuals.finalemusic.com/Fina ... es_txt.htm