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Topic: Better Printer Control (WYSYWIG) (Read 4061 times) previous topic - next topic

Better Printer Control (WYSYWIG)

I submitted the following to the Wish List, but wondered if anyone has any comments or interim suggestions. I sometimes wish to end a line at the end of a specific musical phrase, or for some other reason to control where one system ends and the next starts. NWC has a mind of its own sometimes when it comes to "pretty printing":

I have been using both NWC and a trial copy of MusicEase. The main advantage of MusicEase is that it allows me to break a staff line wherever I wish, and what you see on the screen is what you get on the printer. With NWC the only control I have over the number of measures per line on printout is to mess with the Margins and Staff Size (points) in Page Setup.

Editing is so much easier in other Composing Programs when you can go to a specific page and a specific system and know that whatever changes you make are exactly as they will appear on the final printout.

For instance in NWC, if I want to make a change on the 3rd measure of the 4th system on page 6, I might have to figure out from the print preview and the measure numbers, that this is measure number 175. In other programs I just go to page 6, system 4 and it is obvious what measure it is.

I don't want to switch to another program just because of this one feature (besides it is more expensive)!

Re: Better Printer Control (WYSYWIG)

Reply #1 –
I just read some of the replies to msg #936 which make the point that WYSIWYG score editors "work fine for (say) 3 or 4 parts and maybe 50 to 100 bars, but much more than that and they get slower and slower until each key or mouse click takes results in several seconds pause to repaint."

This may be true, but if NWC gave us an OPTIONAL feature where we could choose to insert our own line breaks OR NOT, this might give us the best of both worlds.

Re: Better Printer Control (WYSYWIG)

Reply #2 –
Yes, line and page breaks are a long-standing wish. This feature will not affect the program's speed. WYSIWYG is a completely separate issue - it would definitely be slower, and is not worth it at this time because there are more important things what users need first.

Finding your place in a score is easy enough with measure numbers, especially if you set them to appear on the printout. Ctrl-G takes you right there.

Re: Better Printer Control (WYSYWIG)

Reply #3 –
And it's always possible, when combining the attributes of two software packages, to get the worst of both worlds!

Re: Better Printer Control (WYSYWIG)

Reply #4 –
Well, line and page breaks could be added in the current Noteworthy style (ie. inserted like any other symbol), without trying to be another product. The difficulty would be extending the broken staff to the right margin, especially if it is only one bar long. Trying to stretch previous staff lines to fill the space would not be easy, and never work quite how the user expects it to, so it would be best simply to extend the line the break is on and live with the ugly but predictable results.

Re: Better Printer Control (WYSYWIG)

Reply #5 –
NWC obviously has a right-justify algorithm, evenly padding bars as required to fit into a system, and can extend a single bar to fill an entire system (e.g. "Extend Last System" option), so adding line breaks shouldn't be too bad... unlike some of the other items on the wish-list, like preserving dynamics etc. during midi import, etc.

Re: Better Printer Control (WYSYWIG)

Reply #6 –
The competing product I was trying has OPTIONAL justification (or unjustification) for the entire score, just the systems specified in a block or just the current system.

You can also set "Equal" spacing where the extra space caused by justification is distributed "evenly" among all notes on a staff, or "Linear", where extra space is distributed more in proportion to notes' durations.

I am sure NWC would be able to adapt to provide similar features. As Blair Dowden and Fred Nachbaur both imply in their replies, this would not be an extreme departure from methods already incorporated in NWC.

Re: Better Printer Control (WYSYWIG)

Reply #7 –
I normally pad a measure with text to push the next bar line to wrap to the next line. This means that I have to toggle between the editor and the print preview to see the result. What could be handy would be somthing like in Excel wher it shows the print area with a dashed line in the spreadsheet. This way I won't have to use the print preview to see the effect of the text padding.

The drawback of text padding is that if anything changes on the score you have to go back to all those text items and move or remove them, which could be painfull if you have a number of staves.

Re: Better Printer Control (WYSYWIG)

Reply #8 –
I've found that I've had to combine Doug and Roelie's techniques:

1. play with the margins, staff sizes and fonts to get close to the number of pages I want, then;

2. add text (spaces) between notes to increase the size of individual bars (especially on the last page), so that extending the last bar to the end of the line looks fairly normal. The problem with this, in addition to the high maintenance cited by Roelie, is trying to remember precisely where I put the extra spacing (since it is, after all, invisible).

I love the algorithm NWC uses to determine note/bar spacing: the music almost invariably looks just as good as professional stuff, and I don't expect that that's an easy thing to accomplish.

However, I have to admit, the lack of 'hard line breaks' to go with that technology is my biggest complaint about NWC.
Which is really quite good, if you think about it.