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Your thoughts on Spaces as a unit:

They are utterly pointless. - 0.0%

They're brilliant! Here's why.... - 60.0%

Relative units would be useful - 40.0%

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Dr. Wiggy
Early music: modern methods

Date Joined Jun 2006
Total Posts : 12628

Posted 11/14/2016 9:38 AM (GMT -6)

It occurs to me that the "Spaces" unit is pretty pointless, because it is a fixed size, rather than a relative size to your staff. One "Finale Space" is always 1/12th of an inch. (Based on the reference staff height of one third of an inch).

So, if your staff height is not 24pt high, and you define your stems to be 3.5 spaces high, you'll be in for a shock.

Am I missing something?

Would a unit that was relative in size to default or current staff be more useful? (If perhaps more complex.) You wouldn't be able to define a staff height in spaces, though as that would get stuck in an infinite loop.

Finale v.25.1, 2012 MacMini; 2012 MacBook Pro (10.11.6 / 10.12.1)
Edirol FA-66; Roland A-49, HP Laserjet 5200 DTN
Ancient Groove Music www.ancientgroove.co.uk

Post Edited (Dr. Wiggy) : 11/14/2016 8:43:00 AM (GMT-6)

Knut
Registered Member

Date Joined Jan 2006
Total Posts : 601

Posted 11/14/2016 10:29 AM (GMT -6)

Spaces are relative in most parts of the program except the Page Layout Tool, and are therefore invaluable.

13" MacBook Pro 2.8 Ghz. Intel Core i5, 16 GB RAM, Apogee Duet 2, Samsung SyncMaster 245b
OSX 10.9.5, Finale 2011c and 2014b (not using it yet) w/GPO & JABB, Patterson Plug-Ins, TG-Tools and QuickKeys 4; Sibelius 6, Logic Pro X, Adobe CS3, FontLab Studio 4, FontExplorer X Pro 3

Dr. Wiggy
Early music: modern methods

Date Joined Jun 2006
Total Posts : 12628

Posted 11/14/2016 11:29 AM (GMT -6)

Knut said...
Spaces are relative in most parts of the program except the Page Layout Tool, and are therefore invaluable.

This is bonkers. So stems in Document Options are set as 3.5 relative spaces? So what happens if you convert to a different unit?

I've just set up a 12pt stave height. and set stems to 21pt. They're not 21 points, they're 3.5 relative spaces!

Quoth the documentation: "These numbers determine the lengths of note stems, measured in the currently selected measurement units." (Doc Opts help)

"...in Finale, one space is equal to 1/12 of an inch..." (Units Help).

Finale v.25.1, 2012 MacMini; 2012 MacBook Pro (10.11.6 / 10.12.1)
Edirol FA-66; Roland A-49, HP Laserjet 5200 DTN
Ancient Groove Music www.ancientgroove.co.uk

Post Edited (Dr. Wiggy) : 11/14/2016 10:48:01 AM (GMT-6)

Dr. Wiggy
Early music: modern methods

Date Joined Jun 2006
Total Posts : 12628

Posted 11/14/2016 11:52 AM (GMT -6)

Oh wait: hang on: I think I've got it.

The values in Doc Options for things like Stem height refer to the REFERENCE STAFF (which is 4 spaces), rather than being absolute values. <Smacks head>

I guess it's obvious, as otherwise nothing would change when you resized a staff.

That needs to be spelt out in the documentation. Otherwise, I think it's safe to ignore me.

Finale v.25.1, 2012 MacMini; 2012 MacBook Pro (10.11.6 / 10.12.1)
Edirol FA-66; Roland A-49, HP Laserjet 5200 DTN
Ancient Groove Music www.ancientgroove.co.uk

Motet
Isorhythmic

Date Joined Dec 2002
Total Posts : 12849

Posted 11/14/2016 12:40 PM (GMT -6)

I've never used spaces.

I'm curious why you like points as units rather than EVPUs.

Finale 2014.5, 2011b, 2005, TGTools
Windows 7, MIDI input
Finale Transposition Chart

Peter Thomsen
Registered Member

Date Joined Jun 2000
Total Posts : 8331

Posted 11/14/2016 12:56 PM (GMT -6)

Motet said...
… I'm curious why you like points as units rather than EVPUs.

For me, the layout calculations are simpler in Points than in EVPUs since the numbers are smaller - smaller numbers take less time to type.

Peter

Mac Finale, 2012c, 2014d & 2014.5, Dolet 6.6 plug-in, Mac OS X 10.11.6, iMac Intel Core i7, 2.93 GHz, 16 GB RAM

Dr. Wiggy
Early music: modern methods

Date Joined Jun 2006
Total Posts : 12628

Posted 11/14/2016 1:06 PM (GMT -6)

Motet said...
I'm curious why you like points as units rather than EVPUs.

Because I have a background in typesetting and publishing.

I know how thin a 0.5pt line is. I know what a 2pt gap between objects looks like. I know that A4 is 595 × 842. I know how big a 45pt margin is.

However, I know that some distances in music are calculated relative to spaces: beams, stems, double barlines, etc. So I was trying to get my head around spaces and got royally confused.

Finale v.25.1, 2012 MacMini; 2012 MacBook Pro (10.11.6 / 10.12.1)
Edirol FA-66; Roland A-49, HP Laserjet 5200 DTN
Ancient Groove Music www.ancientgroove.co.uk

Post Edited (Dr. Wiggy) : 11/14/2016 12:13:00 PM (GMT-6)

Motet
Isorhythmic

Date Joined Dec 2002
Total Posts : 12849

Posted 11/14/2016 1:44 PM (GMT -6)

Makes sense.

Finale 2014.5, 2011b, 2005, TGTools
Windows 7, MIDI input
Finale Transposition Chart

N. Grossingink
Registered Member

Date Joined Nov 2002
Total Posts : 3991

Posted 11/14/2016 2:00 PM (GMT -6)

I've got my units set to inches, first out of familiarity and primarily to assist in page layout. If I have a page where the system margins are .5" and need to move them all up a bitsy bit, .49" or .48" does the trick. I suppose points would work equally well - I'm working in 1/100ths of an inch and points are 1/72nd of an inch, pretty close.

I use spaces and evpus a lot too. When you are engraving music, there are spaces for comparison all over the place - the distance between 2 staff lines. And the evpu is generally the smallest increment accepted in most Finale dialogs. It's .003 inches, rounded off.

It might be nice if you could do math in Finale's dialogs. .5" + 1e will give you .50347". Dig that!

N.

OSX El Capitan 10.11.6
Finale 2011c, 2012c for production work

Finale 2014.5, not used by my clients

(Finale v25 - not interested yet)

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Knut
Registered Member

Date Joined Jan 2006
Total Posts : 601

Posted 11/14/2016 3:26 PM (GMT -6)

Objectively, at least from a professional standpoint, it makes most sense to me to calculate page layout properties and staff hight usin points, and every dimension related to the staff hight in relative spaces. This is somewhat problematic in Finale, which only accepts one global unit at a time.

That said, after many years working in Finale, I find spaces inferior to EVPUs when dealing with the thickness of lines (e.g., 0.14 spaces isn't a very helpful dimension for barlines).

In that regard EVPU is a nice 'middle ground' to work with, because it lets you convert anything to an integer.

Vaughan
Registered Member

Date Joined Jun 1999
Total Posts : 4984

Posted 11/14/2016 3:50 PM (GMT -6)

I agree and have been using EVPUs as long as I can remember. I only switch temporarily to millimeters if I have to set something to an unusual page size which isn't in the preset page sizes.

Vaughan

Finale 3.2 - 25, Sibelius 4 - 7
Patterson's plugins, Tobias' plugins, full version, waiting for Jari's plugin update
MacOS 10.12
MacPro (2016) 16 GB, MacBookPro (2011) 8 GB

Amsterdam

Peter Thomsen
Registered Member

Date Joined Jun 2000
Total Posts : 8331

Posted 11/14/2016 5:17 PM (GMT -6)

Quoting long time Finale user Jim Coull who posted this tip in the forum many years ago:

“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 docs, I think in the section on the Measurement Units submenu.) For example, I usually leave the default units to inches, but if I want to move an articulation over a small amount, I just type "2e" in the H box in the Change Articulation Assignments dialog 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 menu for Measurement Units.”

Peter

Mac Finale, 2012c, 2014d & 2014.5, Dolet 6.6 plug-in, Mac OS X 10.11.6, iMac Intel Core i7, 2.93 GHz, 16 GB RAM

Charles Lawrence
Registered Member

Date Joined Dec 2009
Total Posts : 3638

Posted 11/14/2016 6:33 PM (GMT -6)

FYI: Here are two links into the user manual (Mac) regarding what Peter says:

https://usermanuals.finalemusic.com/Finale2014Mac/Content/Finale/Equivalents.htm

https://usermanuals.finalemusic.com/Finale2014Mac/Content/Finale/OptionsOMeasurement_Units.htm

"Anything is possible if you don't know what you are talking about!"

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OCTO.
The radical answers.

Date Joined Jul 2008
Total Posts : 2659

Posted 11/14/2016 11:14 PM (GMT -6)

Thanks for this thread, a lot to learn. I don't use spaces. Just EVPU and mm.

Finale 2014.5 • OS X: Yosemite, MPB 15', 16GB RAM

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