Help/User Manual

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Kevin Weed Posted February 07, 2017 08:53

I keep finding the user manual un-helpful. Not inaccurate, but not giving the right help, at least in many places.

For instance I clicked the Help box in the Category Designer for Expressions. I want to learn how to adjust the default position of dynamics.

Additional Horizontal Offset. Enter a value here, positive or negative, to make an additional adjustment to the horizontal positioning of the expression.

I am sure this is true, but what is the value? I presume negative would be left. But in inches? EVPUs? Could it not say something like, "Enter a negative number of inches to adjust the position to the left and a positive number to adjust it more to the right."? And can you change the units here? I don't see how. So your answer still leaves us completely in the dark. This answer restates the obvious things, it doesn't give the needed help.

Then, under Vertical Alignment we have Additional Baseline Offset and Additional Entry Offset.

Additional Vertical Offset. Enter a value here, positive or negative, to make an additional adjustment to the vertical positioning of the expression.
Additional Entry Offset. Enter a value here, positive or negative, to make an additional adjustment to the vertical positioning of the expression relative to the entry.

Is positive up, down or away or toward the staff? I will have to experiment to find out. So this "help" doesn't help. And do you mean the expression will be Additionally Offset only if an entry is present, or extends below the staff, for instance? These are the explanations that would make a new user manual a brilliant help.

The whole manual is full of examples like this, and it always has been, at least for 20 years. We don't need a definition, we need the interpretation. What happens when I type x?

2 comments

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PETER THOMSEN Edited February 07, 2017 15:02

Indeed many sections in the user manual could be more user friendly written.

But then you can ask in the Finale forums.

1) You can choose several Measurement Units for Finale.

The default, “out-of-the-box” choice is Inches, but you can change that.

In the sub-menu Measurement Units you have the menu items (sorted alphabetically, not by size):

EVPUs

Inches

Centimeters

Points

Picas

Spaces

To facilitate layout calculations I personally tend to choose Points or EVPUs (= small units; few decimals).

2) You can change the measurement units “on the fly” by typing in a number in one of the measurement dialogs followed by
e for EVPUs (or evpus, or EVPUs)
pt for points (or pts, or points) 1pt = 4e
s for spaces (or sp, or spaces) 1s = 6pt
p for picas (or pi, or picas) 1p = 2s
i for inches (or ", or in, or inch, or inches) 1i = 6p
c for centimeters (or cm, or centimeters)
m for millimeters (or mm, or millimeters)
(BTW, these are all listed in the online manual, I think in the section on the Measurement Units submenu.) For example, I usually leave the default units to Points, but if I want to move an expression horizontally over by a small amount, I just type "2e" in the H box, and Finale does the rest.

Note: When you’re overriding the global setting in this way, you even have an extra unit option (millimeters) not available in the sub-menu for Measurement Units.

3) To understand the Positioning settings in the Category Designer, think of a cartesian coordinate system, with a horizontal X-axis, and a vertical Y-axis.

The left half of the pane deals with the horizontal settings (= X-axis, positive values right, negative values left).

The right half of the pane deals with the vertical settings (= Y-axis, positive values up, negative values down).

For the Vertical positioning (= the left half of the pane) you also have the option of positioning the expression relative to an entry that goes vertically outside the staff.

In that particular case you do not want the expression to have the same vertical position as the other expressions, but rather move the expression vertically away, to avoid collision with the “outside staff” entry.

I hope that this is clear?

If not, ask again.

J ADRIAN VERKOUTEREN Posted February 07, 2017 16:38

Peter made my first point, that the values types are related to the measurement units you use.

But I agree with you that the manual could make explicit how positive and negative values affect the direction of change.

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