Re: engraving comparisons and other "promotional" materials

[Janek Warchoł]

2013/12/7 Joseph Rushton Wakeling <address@hidden>:
> On 07/12/13 19:18, Janek Warchoł wrote:
>> ?????????????????????????????????????????????????????
>> Have you looked at "Eja Mater awful Finale.pdf"?  Do you consider the
>> issues marked in red minor?  They actually make it very difficult to
>> sing the rhythm correctly!
>
>
> That one example in bar 69 is very "ouch", but it's the kind of problem that
> would be an issue for sightreading only -- you'd fix it and move on.

My experience says otherwise (maybe because my choir is not
professional): we continued to sing this moment badly for the next 5
years.

> I have to say that I do wonder if that was user error, though -- because I
> never came up with such a catastrophic misalignment when I was using Finale.

I have seen it about 10 times already, in scores coming from different
people. I can send you more examples in private.

> At a guess, perhaps caused by the user entering more notes than could fit in
> the bar, then deleting some of them, or otherwise correcting note lengths?

No idea.

> The one in bar 80 doesn't strike me as much of an issue.  An irritation but
> not in any way a serious problem, because it isn't out of sync with anything
> else horizontally.  I was far more concerned about the placement of the dots
> on the dotted 8ths, because that _did_ seem like something that could jar
> the reading of the single line parts, even when you "know" the rhythm.
>
> I don't mean to dismiss your concerns here, but I think that these problems
> are small fry in the scale of the kinds of illegibility or ambiguity or
> simply reading difficulty that there can be in parts put in front of
> musicians.  You probably haven't seen some of the hand-written parts (from
> reputable publishers!) that I have ... :-)

Well, if we're speaking of hand-written stuff, then yes.  But as far
as the "engraved" output from notation software, i havent' seen much
worse problems.

>> Do you have a spare expert Finale user?  Because the problem is that
>> on the *LilyPond* mailing list it's hard to find expert Finale users.
>> We'd have to hire someone, and that costs money.
>
> No, but I imagine that if you went on the Finale mailing list and said,
> "Hey, we're trying out this challenge as part of a drive to test and improve
> our usability, anyone up for it?" you'd get some volunteers.  You don't need
> a super-hot-whizzkid-who-works-for-Bärenreiter, you just need someone who is
> competent and capable and knows their way around the software.

ok, sounds reasonable.