This is a well known issue when opening older documents in Finale v26.

I hope you did see the warnings from MakeMusic?

The fix is to edit the articulation definition, setting the Handle Positioning to zero.

Then, you can drag the articulation.

You may have tried nudging the articulation with the arrow keys - which may not work.

But dragging works.

For fixing “thousands of documents” this is no small undertaking, sorry.

However, Tech Support may know a faster way.

Consider opening the files in your previous Finale version (= v25 perhaps?), then using the Graphics Tool to export the files as PDF files.

In that way you can still print the files with the correct articulation layout.

Perhaps this is redundant but when opening the older documents, did you tell Finale NOT to update the articulation positioning? This usually works for me if I've positioned articulations manually.

This was a huge problem for me, too. I finally uninstalled v.26 and went back to using v.25 (which doesn't work all that well with Mac's Mojave OS, but at least the articulations are in the right places!). I would warn everyone who shares files (like I do with publishers) to NOT upgrade to v.26!!!

Just wondering... I've had fairly good experiences with Finale's new articulation paradigm so far but, to be fair, most of my manual tweaking was to compensate for what Finale finally does properly. If I let Finale redo the articulation placement, it usually produces good results. If I tell Finale not to update the positioning, it generally leaves the articulations alone. In both cases, it's sometimes useful to select all the articulations in the file at once and clear the manual positioning. OTOH, I've read that subsequently loading the file in Finale 25 can give bad results.

Vaughan's right...opening a file created in v.26 in any earlier version will not work. All the articulations will be off. Finale 26 is not backwards compatible and definitely not worth the money to upgrade.

The key is to open a copy of your v25 file in v26. If you prefer the older file, keep it.

Unless your client hasn't upgraded yet and doesn't plan to for a year or more (if ever).

I know it a little late to say now, but if I had a client who used v25, I would have exercised the option to keep it on my machine and keep a copy of the client's files in v25.

If you still have a version of the file in v25 format, can you open it and use the v26 option NOT to update the articulations?