NOTATIO

After years of engraving, I've pretty much arrived at similar settings to Peter's. Mine are 0.1 for staff lines, 0.125 for stems, 0.145 for ledger lines and 0.16 for barlines. This is for 6-7 cm. staff height. @OCTO: no, notation isn't composing, and I agree with the sentiment 'to each his own profe...

Good heavens, while I was writing the above (and, admittedly, eating lunch), there were more than 6 posts added! Lively discussion! The idea of adapting line settings to size reduction is excellent and very much in the spirit of hundreds of years of good engraving. As such, John's settings are very ...

Interesting discussion. I think that lines should vary between guiding the eye (staff lines) and catching the eye (stems, beams, ledger lines). The former shouldn't be too thick, as they are constant and therefore don't need emphasis. As such, I find ± 0.1 spaces for staff lines to be a good thickne...

VaughanM wrote:Carefully thought-out default settings could create a lot more beauty/less ugliness for relatively little effort.

Amen!

I've been following Daniel Spreadbury's blog with much interest and fascination, as well. Needless to say, I'm looking forward to the release of his program with great anticipation. Fin and Sib are both very old programs and still full of legacy code and throwbacks to old user interfaces and remnant...

OCTO wrote:////////

Very nice, Octo! Thanks for explaining how it works. I wouldn't have known to have pressed Post Reply first.

Good point, John. The crossing voices could be looked upon as a kind of deal-breaker for notating the passage on one staff, and I concur with the desire for notational consistency.

John, that's actually one of Finale's beam settings. Here are the descriptions of two of these settings: Flatten Beams Based On Standard Note. Using this option the beam angle will be determined by the note which is closest to the center staff line—the Standard Note. Where there are two notes equidi...

Although I understand the desire to see the middle of the measure, I also still prefer Octo 2, as it seems less cluttered and the clarity of the notation doesn't suffer. I also wonder why this isn't just as clear as the pseudo Kodaly example:

I very much like the bent lines of the two centre examples. Next to them, the other accents seem stiff, although the smaller accents on the right slightly less so. The centre examples would fit very well into a font with rounded edges and slightly irregular, 'organic' shapes, like the November font.