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-   -   More formatting woes (http://www.notation.com/vb-forum/showthread.php?t=2838)

dj 10-06-2009 03:12 PM

More formatting woes
 
1 Attachment(s)
Hi, guys:

Having found some rough work-arounds to my non-hiding staff problems, I am now up against an annoying difficulty.

I have a score for a new production which needs the following parts: Conductor, Organ and Vocal.

I am having a very difficult time making the formatting of the page view "stick". Each time I load up one of the files, one or more of the parts must be re-paginated and re-formatted. This is, to say the least, tedious. I need to be able to count on the same pagination and formatting each time, so that I can print them out as needed.

In the attached file, the Conductor part maintains its formatting, but, when I call up the Organ part, the formatting disappears each time it is loaded.

I have tried formatting each bar manually; I have tried do so by specifying number of bars per system and I have tried with and without Lock. Each time, the formatting for the Organ part disappears when loaded anew.

This is only an example of several such files and in each of them, it seems to be a different part that won't keep its formatting.

On one or two files (and I can't remember which, now), one page has come up "squashed", with several systems jammed together and attempting to un-Lock the formatting causes a complete system crash. I had to delete the part and recreate it in order to use the file.

However, deleting multiple parts seems to cause a crash on Save, so care must be taken there.

This, combined with the sudden un-hideable staff problem noted elsewhere, is very curious as I've not run into these problems before.

David

herbert 10-08-2009 08:51 AM

Re: More formatting woes
 
Hi David,

Consistency of formatting and printing the score has always been a mystery to me.

At some time, using the command “Refresh entire score” repeated after each formatting step seemed to provide some consistency. After renaming the .not file for printing only, I never edited the file again and used it only for printing.

Now, I create a .pdf file to get consistent printing of the score. This is not ideal.

Herbert

dj 10-08-2009 11:29 AM

Re: More formatting woes
 
H, Herbert:

Thanks for your reply.

I've not really had any major difficulties prior to this with formatting (at least since the page formatting was actually finalized in Composer Beta 0.70-something), and I've done some intense projects (700+ page orchestrations for a big musical, etc.). I've been running into some new difficulties lately and I'm not sure where they are stemming from.

I have done a very kludgy work-around (or end-run, perhaps) for this project by having separate directories for Organ, Vocal and Conductor parts and having complete sets of the files in each, formatted specifically for each part. I still have about five files that have to be re-formatted each time they are loaded, though.

It seems in each that there is one bar that will not accept its formatting and that throws the following bars off.

Once I get my printouts done on this, I'll investigate further.

David

dj 10-08-2009 11:31 AM

Re: More formatting woes
 
Hi, again:

I just noted that you and I both joined this forum in December of 1969, which means that we must have both been connected to the old U.S. military Arpanet. I don't remember having a PC at home when I was 13, though. ;)

David

Sherry C 10-08-2009 12:40 PM

Re: More formatting woes
 
Howdy guys,

Not trying to duck anything here, but the most common scenarios we've run into with customers who suddenly have formatting problems where they haven't before is that Windows has updated something (sometimes automagically) that causes problems and/or the printer driver needs to be updated. Could either (or both) of those be a possibility here David? Typically for such situations, updating the printer drivers takes care of the problem.

Quote:

Originally Posted by dj (Post 12905)
I just noted that you and I both joined this forum in December of 1969, which means that we must have both been connected to the old U.S. military Arpanet. I don't remember having a PC at home when I was 13, though. ;)

David

You always were a precocious one, though :D

ttfn,
Sherry

herbert 10-09-2009 09:37 AM

Re: More formatting woes
 
Hi David,

You said:

“I just noted that you and I both joined this forum in December of 1969, which means that we must have both been connected to the old U.S. military Arpanet. I don't remember having a PC at home when I was 13, though.”

Interesting - The internet does not only influence our future but also changes our past.

Herbert.

wwwpdx 03-11-2014 04:33 PM

Re:2nd and subsequent pages not formatted as the 1st.
 
The pages after page 1 do not take the format of the 1st page. The vertical spacing is larger etc. Am I missing some function here? Is there a solution?

Sherry C 03-11-2014 08:11 PM

Re: 2nd and subsequent pages not formatted as the 1st.
 
Hi,

Quote:

Originally Posted by wwwpdx (Post 65232)
The pages after page 1 do not take the format of the 1st page. The vertical spacing is larger etc. Am I missing some function here? Is there a solution?

There is a lot of flexibility in the formatting area. If you have not yet seen the Tutorial Video on Formatting, I would strongly suggest watching that as a first step to learning about the most commonly used tools (and some tips and tricks, too). You can find that at http://www.notation.com/vb-forum/showthread.php?t=3725

If the video doesn't help you figure it out, please do post a copy of the file here, and let us know what you're trying to do with it.

ttfn,
Sherry

wwwpdx 03-19-2014 05:16 PM

Re: 2nd and subsequent pages not formatted as the 1st.
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Sherry C (Post 65234)
Hi,



There is a lot of flexibility in the formatting area. If you have not yet seen the Tutorial Video on Formatting, I would strongly suggest watching that as a first step to learning about the most commonly used tools (and some tips and tricks, too). You can find that at http://www.notation.com/vb-forum/showthread.php?t=3725

If the video doesn't help you figure it out, please do post a copy of the file here, and let us know what you're trying to do with it.

ttfn,
Sherry

Thanks for trying, but my prob not solved.
It seems that all the pages of a score should format the same as the 1st page.
I'm just trying to save a tree.

dj 03-20-2014 12:56 PM

Re: More formatting woes
 
Hi,

The idea behind the page layout mechanism was to have Composer lay things out the way it thinks they best fit the page, then allow the user to move things as they wish to satisfy their need.

One good starting point is to re-set your format to the default (Layout/Page Layout/Def). This should set your pages to roughly the same, give or take a couple of bars.

You can move staves and bars from one page to another with the tools in the Page Layout toolbar. You can also manually set the number of bars displayed, not just per page, but per staff, using "Specify number of bars per line tool (bpl)". And, finally, you can move staves up or down on the page (and whole pages of staves) using "Move barlines and staves in select mode (enter)" and dragging the boxes that appear. That screen also lets you (in a limited way) drag individual barlines across the staff, to space measures out.

It's not a fully automatic procedure, but then musical notation is so different from bar to bar that it's hard for a program to outguess the composer.

Good luck.

David

kknollman 03-22-2014 09:37 PM

Re: More formatting woes
 
2 Attachment(s)
I am having a similar problem. It appears that Composer is trying to automatically set the vertical spacing on a page to fill the page. If there are 6 systems on a page, because that is what develops as a result of my setting the font size, Composer sets the vertical spacing between staves in each system and between each system to look good. If there are only 4 systems left for the last page, however, it stretches the vertical spacing between staves and between systems to fill the whole page, which looks terrible. Is there a way to force the vertical spacing to remain the same on all pages? I viewed the video, but found no discussion on how to do that. I have attached a score to demonstrate.
Thanks.

Sherry C 03-22-2014 09:56 PM

Re: More formatting woes
 
Hi,

If you would like to change the way the systems are distributed among pages (and I've been doing that myself on a big band arrangement today :) ), you can use the Page Layout/Insert Page Break button (or System break) to break up the system distribution more the way that you would like them.

Since a picture is worth a lot of words, I'll point you to the Users Guide (Help/Users Guide) and you can use the Index to look up "layout" or "page layout" for step-by-step instructions to massaging the score the way you want it to look. Musician and Composer offer a lot of tools to help you get it perfect for you (which is good, because some of my instrumentalists want it all on one page, while others want everything spelled out really big, and therefore on multiple pages :) ).

ttfn,
Sherry


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