Unstable articulations in Finale

[John Ruggero]

The following bug has been confirmed today by MakeMusic: articulations placed on staves in reduced sizes appear to jump rightward when selected with the select tool in Finale 2014 (and 2011 and probably other versions). They return to their correct positions when the screen is redrawn or resized. One must be viewing the staff at somewhat greater than 100% zoom to see this. It makes articulation editing a nightmare because one never knows exactly where the articulation will appear after one has adjusted it. The bug has also been confirmed on the MM Forum.

Unstable articulations.jpg (204.63 KiB) Viewed 9934 times

In the illustration, articulations on the 2nd, 3rd and 4th beats of both measures are actually positioned as on beat 1, but have been selected and shoved over to fictitious positions as shown. I also attach a .musx file.

Unstable articulations2.musx

(82.41 KiB) Downloaded 499 times

Has anyone else encountered this? And how would one work around it?

[Knut]

It's been this way for years, and as far as I can remember, it used to be that way to a certain extent on normal sized staffs as well.

It's been a while since I did any work with small staff, but I have always used an articulation set that has all glyphs centered around the origin point (x/y 0 point and with no right side bearing) in the font itself. This seemed to help a lot in earlier versions at least. You could easily set this up in FontForge with the main articulations and see if it helps.

[John Ruggero]

Knut, thanks for the interesting suggestion. It would give me a good excuse to do some more experimenting with FontForge. However, a simple work-around has just occurred to me: I'll do any fine editing of articulations in scroll view, since all staves are 100% and there is no problem. I hate scroll view, but I have finally found a good reason to use it.

[OCTO]

The resized staff in Finale has many bugs, actually.

It's been a while since I did any work with small staff, but I have always used an articulation set that has all glyphs centered around the origin point (x/y 0 point and with no right side bearing) in the font itself. .. You could easily set this up in FontForge with the main articulations and see if it helps.

Interesting. Can you confirm? I don't have FF now, but I will test it once.

The following bug has been confirmed today by MakeMusic

Today?? It has been since ever.

[Knut]

Interesting. Can you confirm?

Unfortunately this old trick, introduced by Steven Powell and his DVM Articulations font, seems to has no effect on the current problem with shifting articulations on small staffs. I should point out, however, that I don't get as large a shift with my own fonts as in John's screen shot, regardless of articulation metrics. Don't know why, unfortunately.

I usually input articulations in ScrollView, so that might be the reason I haven't encountered the problem that often.

[John Ruggero]

I posted over at MM forum as well, and OCTO replied there, supplying some more information about this bug and others that he had posted last year including some nice videos. I have no idea why I never encountered this before. But this is apparently not uncommon because, as Knut mentions, it depends on one's work flow.

http://forum.makemusic.com/default.aspx?f=6&m=465807

Other "interesting" and actually more dramatic shifts are created by selecting various options from the articulation designer Positioning>position with various reductions and also enlargements. Zuill pointed out that enlargements move the articulation to the left.