Formatting a Part Using a Template

Using commands in the Part menu, you can specify many details about how a part is formatted: the page setup, overall font size, horizontal and vertical spacing,font size for types of text, showing or hiding types of music annotations, showing or hiding instrument names, hiding empty staves and displaying "easy notes".

You can save this formatting as a template that you can apply to other songs using the Format Part Using Template command in the Part menu.

You might also want to modify some of Composer's default templates to adopt the formatting you want. You can directly edit the formatting of Composer's templates. You can also open one of Composer's templates and copy the formatting from your own template.

To save the formatting of a currently viewed part as a template:

1.      Use the Save As command in the File menu, and save the current song with a new name in the \Program Files\MidiNotate\Composer\Templates directory. Save the file with a .not filename extension, just like a normal MidiNotate song file. This step assures that you will not alter your original file as you make a template file.

2.      Any notes, lyrics, free text, and most of the content of the template file should be removed, since it will be ignored when the template is applied to a new song, or when it is used to format another song. It is not necessary for you to remove this extra content, but the template will open more quickly each time you use it, if you do the following:

     Delete all of the measures except the first few measures.

     Remove all of the notes, lyrics, and free text in these remaining measures.

     Delete all parts except the one that has the formatting you wish to use as a template. You can do this by selecting each part, one at a time, using the Select Part command in the Part menu, and deleting the unwanted parts with the Delete Part command.

3.      Use the Save command in the File menu to resave the template .not file that you prepared above. Now you can use this version of the file as a format template.

To apply the formatting of a template to a currently viewed part:

1.      Choose the Format Part Using Template command in the Part menu.

-- OR --

Type "qfput" for Format Part Using Template.

Composer will display a File Open dialog box, and will initially display the files in the \Program Files\MidiNotate\Composer\Templates directory.

2.      Choose a template .not file in the template directly, and click the OK button.

Composer will apply the formatting of the most recently opened part in the template to the part that you are currently viewing.

To apply the formatting of a template to multiple parts in a song:

1.      Follow the above procedure to apply the formatting of a template to one part.

2.      Follow the directions in the next topic, Copying the Format of a Part to Other Parts, to format all of the remaining parts in the current song.

To quickly customize the formatting of Composer's default templates:

1.      Prepare your own template .not file as described above.

2.      Open each of Composer's template files in the \Program Files\MidiNotate\Composer\Templates directory, using the Format Part Using Template command to copy the formatting of your template to Composer's default templates.

For example, if you use Composer's "Voice and Piano" template when you create new songs, then apply this procedure to the file \Program Files\MidiNotate\Composer\Templates\Voice and Piano.not.

Visit the MidiNotate forum discussion on this feature (requires connection to the Internet):
 Learn tips from other MidiNotate users.  Ask a question about this feature.  Offer tips to other MidiNotate users.  View and report software bugs and documentation errors.  Submit and review feature requests.