I completely agree. Often, if I find Verse 1 is too high (or low) on a particular system, or throughout the piece on a particular staff, I'm going to want to maintain the same distances between Verse 1 and 2, &3, etc., but we're required to move each lyric line individually. It makes sense to have a method to move all of them at once and maintain the established spacing relationship between multiple Verses and Choruses.

I don't see how the Adjust Baselines does what I want. Unless you mean that I have to the math and cycle through every verse adding the correct amount to each offset. That's hardly what "all at once" means to me. (Never mind that any time a computer program makes me do math it failed.)

Hi Robert:

I wasn't suggestion the Adjust Baselines dialog box was the final solution, just more exact and more easily automated than dragging arrows. Apologies if I got your hopes up.

Cheers,

Michael Johnson

VP, Professional Notation

MakeMusic

Michael, I'd just like to "vote" for redesign of the Adjust Baselines dialog.  It is one of the most annoying things in Finale when, in a tight layout, I transpose a song down, and now 4 verses and 1 chorus of lyrics need to be moved down by, say, 0.15.

First I need to get a drink of water to cool down.  Then I bring up Adjust Baselines dialog.  Then I need bullet Verse, type in 1, then do the math in my head to figure out the new offset, type it in.  Then I wipe off the sweat, because I must repeat this for the other 3 verses and again for the chorus.  And nothing shows in the view until I click Apply, so I don't know if I made a mistake, such as forgetting a stupid minus (-) sign or decimal point, until the end.

To resolve this, there should be a command to Adjust all lyric baselines by ___.  In addition, all lyric baselines should be shown in a table, editable all at once.

Duly noted Jerome. I concur the solution should be easy and intuitive.

Cheers,

Michael Johnson

VP, Professional Notation

MakeMusic

This problem has been festering for years. Has it finally been addressed in the recently released Finale 27?

Nope.

Dennis Green

I just added a couple of Lua scripts that do it. (For any Finale version as long as you have the free plugin JW Lua installed.) The scripts are installed at Nick Mazuk's script repository. There is also a video linked there that details the easiest way to get started with it.

Because of the dependencies in the repository, it is strongly recommended to download the whole thing and then activate the ones you want directly out of the src directory.

Exciting, Robert, but I cannot find the basic JW Lua Plugin.  The video series explains how to program in Lua, which is nice – but really I looked around that site and on Finale Superuser for a half hour and found lots of interesting scripts but not that basic JW Lua Plugin to which you refer.   Please give me a clue (or maybe a direct link :). 

Weird. Googling "JW Lua Plugin" goes right to it for me. But I know that Google results are different for different people.

I converted some of my lesser used one-off plugin options in the Patterson Plugins collection to lua scripts and posted a page of how get them. It's slightly out of date, but it has enough info for the industrious:

http://robertgpatterson.com/-fininfo/-jwluainfo/deprecated.html

Thank you, Robert.  I found the "JW Lua Plugin", in the form of jwlua64.bundle.  I also cloned and downloaded the directory of .lua scripts, including your new one.  In my Finale Plug-Ins folder, I created a subfolder named "JW Lua", and into this subfolder I put that bundle and all of those .lua scripts.  But when I relaunch Finale 26, in the main menu > Plug-ins, although the plugin bundle appears as "JW Lua…" menu item, none of the .lua scripts appear in the menu, as they do appear in this Finale Superuser video at 1:20. Clicking the "JW Lua…" menu item produces a "JW Lua" window with tabs Explorer, Manager and Development.  Is there something in there which would load your script?  I don't get it.

What else do I need to do? Here is a screenshot of my Finale main menu, with a macOS Finder window in the background showing my Finale Plug-Ins > JW Lua folder.

My recommendation is not to place the scripts inside Finale's plug-ins menu. Just the JW Lua Plugin. Put the scripts (from the repo) elsewhere in a separate directory just as you downloaded them. Then use the Manager tab of JW Lua to add the scripts you want to the Menu group (first group in the list). After adding, restart Finale and the scripts should appear in the Plugin menu alongside JW Lua.

Or you can follow the instructions on the link I sent previously to load them all. Your call.

To clarify:

Put the jwlua64.bundle inside a separate sub-directory of Finale's plugin directory

Put the repo downloaded from github somewhere else entirely, say MyUser/Documents/Lua Scripts, or wherever is most convenient for you.

Then use the Manager tab of JW Lua to tell the plugin to load which scripts you want it to load. It can load them from any directory, but because of internal dependencies in the Nick Mazuk scripts, you need to have the entire thing downloaded even if you only load the lyrics nudgers.

Thank you, Robert.  I have installed your heroic scripts now and can move lyric baselines up and down with one click, as though Finale was a real computer program :))

In the video referenced above, I still think that Finale Superuser skipped over the hard parts around 1:20.  In addition to the clarification in your previous message, I therefore offer here a couple more details to help future readers:

• The location of Finale's Plugin directory is set in Preferences > Folders.

• To add a Lua script to JW Lua, click the JW Lua… menu item.  In the window that opens, in the top half, Plug-in Groups, select [menu].  Then in the bottom half, Items in Group, click the New… button, then navigate to and select the desired .lua script files.

Can you translate this for Windows users please? I got as far as downloading jwlua64-beta-v0_54.zip and creating the JW Plug-ins directory, but it's not a bundle file as in the tutorial. I see a dll, fxt and a html file, which I copied to the new folder. The html looks like the scripts for it. Should that be copied elsewhere? The sample script link is useless for my pay grade. Where do I go from here?

Looks like this topic discusses how to install Finale plug-Ins in Windows.

That topic was of no help, but I've solved most of my problems by trial and error, lots of trials and errors, except for an extra line at the top of the menu that's not in the example but looks like a label but highlights like a click zone. If and when I solve that, I'll be making a script for what I did to pass to a friend assuming I can recreate the path without the dozens of deletes and undos. I can post it here in case other first-timers have the same difficulties. Sorry, but I have no experience or account to post a video on YouTube. Besides not being applicable to Windows, the Mac video skips a lot of steps because he's adding to an existing group.

Dennis, we still don't know what version of Finale you are using or what computer operating system and version you are using other than Windows.

I'm using Windows 10 and Finale 26. I usually keep up to date except when new hardware is required as with Windows 11. I also hope to apply what I learn if I can for a band member using 2014 who thinks it's good enough and won't spend the money to upgrade, so I'm waiting on that video of the sharing capabilities of 27. His pointing out that MuseScore manages lyric collisions is what prompted my original post.

Here is the location for Plug-ins in Finale Windows 10.

That's step 1 of many. The fact that all three files go there was buried in a note link that I missed at first. The scripts were not in the samples as in the video but on the other site directed above. It took a while to realize that to get the scripts, you use the "Code" button which I eventually noticed had a download icon on it. Since the Finale in the video already had some scripts installed, it skipped the initial sub menu screen you get from the Finale plug-in menu on the first use, and on that sub menu, you have to change the Mode to be able to enter/browse the address of your scripts. (The Edit button takes you there subsequently if you need a script stored in a different folder.) Then, you can finally load the scripts in the Manager lower window from the Explore window of your scripts that pops up from the New button. My final confusion was the extra line in the menu, but I now realize it's the path to the manager. It was not at the top of the list in the video, so if you blink while he scrolls down, you miss it. I thought I had done something wrong at first, but at that point I was well past my bedtime. I was expecting that to be elsewhere or require a right-click rather than in the list of plug-ins. The lyric baseline adjusts in fixed increments that appear to match the half-tone steps of the notes when changing keys, which makes sense.

You can configure the up/down increments the the script uses. By default they are set to +/- one staff space (24 evpus). You can override these values with a plain text file.

1. Create a subfolder inside your downloaded script/src directory called script_settings (script/src/script_settings).
2. Create a plain text file called lyrics_baseline_move.config.txt inside the new script_settings folder.
3. Add two lines to the text file:
   nudge_up_evpus = 24 -- This can be any number of evpus > 0
   nudge_down_evpus = 24 -- This can be any number of evpus > 0

You can see how this works if you examine the script files. Here is a screen shot of a text editor: