Finale, Document Styles, and Never Making that Edit Again

5/15/2011 6:41:03 AM #

To get to the "Document Styles" folder quickly on Windows 7, type "%appdata%\MakeMusic\Finale 2011\Music Files\Document Styles\" in the search bar found in the start menu.

Tyler

5/15/2011 6:09:05 PM #

I don't know what I would do without document styles!  Every year when upgrading Finale to the newest version, the very first thing I do is create a new document style (using the broadway copyist document style as a starting point).  I deal with a lot of different ensembles all the time, so creating templates doesn't really make sense for me.  Plus, whenever I find myself making the same change to all arrangements time and time again, I'll just edit the document style and then I never have to worry about it again...

It's important to mention that document styles do more than just save text preferences (like arranger, composer, score insert, etc.) – I know it's also mentioned in greater detail in the linked post, but still only just the tip of the iceberg...

The majority of the bands I arrange for are Latin Jazz combos or salsa bands (4 - 17 parts) which is relatively small compared to a full orchestra's instrumentation.  So most of my charts have the score in landscape and parts in portrait - this, and all margins, text layout on each page, my signature at the bottom, page 2-xx page headings, etc. are all preserved in the document style and allow me to focus more time on arranging and less time formatting pages.  (The preservation of page margins is especially nice.)  One of the other things I really like about document styles is that you can create a title page in the score part (as page 1) and then have that same title page layout available (and auto-populate) for every new file - saves so much time!

I do remember the days before document styles (and before linked parts) and that was the pivotal point when I started to use Finale a lot more – it became much quicker for me to use Finale, even for quick lead sheets, than to do things by hand.  This is also due to the fact that your metatool assignments, which are like "keyboard shortcuts" for tools and for expressions/glyphs within those tools, are preserved with document styles.  The slowest, most inefficient way to do anything on a computer is usually through a mouse, and memorizing keyboard shortcuts to switch tools is a piece of cake (for me)...

Anyways, great blog post.  I hope this comment encourages more people to look into document styles!

DM

(PS - the only reason I create a new document style every year is so I can take fully take advantage of all the new features and tweaks.  Your document styles are not touched by the installer when upgrading, which is nice, my only complaint is having to spend the time each year to re-do this with every version of Finale, but it's only a once-a-year investment in time, so it's worth it.)

Daniel Menjivar

5/17/2011 5:04:53 AM #

HI Scott,

Thanks for the follow-up, but I didn't mean to imply that I thought MakeMusic should make it so you don't have to update your document styles each year.  In fact, I think that would be a terrible idea.

The way it is now, whenever you upgrade your software, your documents styles are untouched, which I think is perfect.  But every year the document styles do get updated slightly, not only to take advantage of new features (like when measure expressions where categorized into sections) but also to make some positioning and font tweaks.  If Finale were to make these same adjustments to my document style it would create a mess.  There are some things (a lot actually) that I change from the default document style in terms of positioning, etc. so to have my document style automatically altered on upgrade would be annoying.

A positive example I can think of, however, is with the Broadway Copyist "handwritten" document style.  The year it first came out, it was pretty incomplete - there were a lot of things still using Times New Roman font (like in repeats, for example) and the implementation of rehearsal marks was pretty ugly.  (The square boxes around them didn't look that great, and were very messed up once you chose a thin letter like "I" for example.)  But once the next version came out which included the ability to dynamically create rehearsal marks and not have to create each letter, the presentation of the rehearsal marks in the Broadway Copyist document style also changed from a square around the letter, to a circle.  Much better, and something I definitely wanted to take advantage of.  It made sense to create a custom document style based on the new one...

Yes, it does take some time to update the document style each year, (of course, another solution would be to just not upgrade, but that's not very practical), but there is nothing preventing me from using the older document style in the meantime.  It just means I don't get to fully take advantage of some of the new features until I do.  And that's OK.  If Finale updated your document styles each year for you, that would be a big mess.

Having said that, what would be a much better idea (but perhaps too niche of a request to incorporate) would be to have a way to compare one file's settings or libraries with another.  If I could take my existing (old) document style and have it compared with the new one and see what's different (spacing and alignment, measure expressions, margins, etc.) that would definitely save a lot of time.  It would be a big task to take on though, and again, probably too niche of a request to incorporate.

Off the top of my head, one of the most urgent things I would change about the built-in Broadway Copyist document style is the size of the coda and D.S. marks (the actual $ mark, not the "D.S. al coda" text repeat).  Who ever places a coda mark or $ mark in their charts that small anyways?

My other recommendations for Finale that I've submitted so far (via this blog) haven't seen the light of day yet, so I'm not holding my breath.  But nonetheless, thanks again Scott.

DM

Daniel Menjivar