A utility that performs several PostScript functions in conjuction with Finale.
Illustrious Music fills in a few gaps in Finale’s handling of PostScript. It has also become a catch-all for just about anything I wanted to do with and for Finale but didn’t want to write a whole separate program to do.
Illustrious Music does the following:
• Translates Finale EPS files to Illustrator 3.0 format (this is the big, cool feature, thus the name).
• Merges two PostScript files (explained below).
• Adds Crop Marks to a PostScript file.
Illustrator Files
For those of you not versed in Mac illustration programs, Illustrator is THE graphics package. Don’t talk to me about Freehand or Canvas, I don’t want to hear it. Anyway, there are many occasions when you might want to use music in a graphics program. You may be into strange and unusual music systems, and Finale just doesn’t cut it. You may want to use music as part of a design piece. Or, you may just be a finicky music typesetter and want to treat the music as a PURE graphic so you can tweak it to your heart’s content. You could, of course, write the music out as a regular EPS file, but that doesn’t let you access the individual elements of the music (you can’t get in and change the color of the clefs, for example, or the thickness of just one slur). This feature lets you do that.
First, use Finale to get the music as close as you can to what you want it to finally look like. Although Illustrator lets you do a lot, believe me, you don’t want to be doing music formatting in a graphics package. When you have the music set, choose Compile PostScript Listing from the File menu, click EPS File of Page, type in the page number, and click Compile. Name the EPS file something appropriate. Do NOT use the Download fonts option when compiling the EPS file. Ilustrator will take care of the fonts for you.
Start Illustrious Music and choose the Translate EPS File command from the menu. Open the EPS file you just saved in Finale. Illustrious Music replaces the .eps file ending with the .ART ending for Illustrator (you can call it whatever you want though). Name the new Illustrator file, watch the thermometer march across the screen, and then quit the program. Start Illustrator 3.0 and open the file. Voila! The music appears in Illustrator format. You can do anything you could normally do to an Illustrator graphic (the file will open slowly on the first time, but speed will increase a bit when you save it again).
This feature does NOT work with MusicProse. MusicProse’s EPS format is currently too different from that of Finale.
Set Conversion Options
This menu item in the File menu lets you set a couple of options for how the file should be converted. First of all, you can name the shade (grayscale level) of the music. 0 means the music comes out white, 100 is black. Intermediate values give you different shades of gray. If you click Set Music in Custom Color, Illustrious Music creates a custom color and uses it for all of the music. The custom color is initially black, but by changing it (within Illustrator), you can quickly change the color of all of your music.
A couple of other things to be aware of: first of all, if you use text in your Finale file, you may get a warning message when you try to open the converted file in Illustrator. The message will warn you that some text may not be displayed correctly. I’ve never been able to find any problems with it, so just click OK in the dialog box and keep going.
The other thing to be aware of is that it’s entirely possible that this program will not work in all cases (that is, Illustrator will not be able to open the converted file). Re-parsing PostScript is an extremely complex process, and it’s possible that I didn’t account for every possibility (although it’s been heavily tested with many standard and unusual scores). If you come across a file that doesn’t work, feel free to send me a copy and take a look at it.
Merge PS Files
There are certain circumstances when it is beneficial to keep a PostScript file version of your music around for faster printing. The problem with this approach is that if you make a few changes to one page, you either have to recompile the whole piece to get a perfect PostScript file, or you have to compile that one page and remember that in addition to the master file, you have a separate PostScript file for that one page. If you’re dealing with eighty pages of score this way, it quickly gets old.
Most people will never have use for this feature, but I did one day, and so I decided to throw it it. Choose this command from the Other menu, choose the ‘master’ PostScript file (the one with pages to be replaced), then choose the revised PostScript file (with just one or a few revised pages). Name the new file to be created. The program checks each page in the master file and looks for a corresponsponding page in the revised file. If one exists, it substitutes the old for the new. Therefore, you can generate a PostScript file of a twenty page score, make revisions to page 14-16, compile a PostScript file of just those three pages, and use this feature to merge them together into one file without having to recompile the whole thing.
Like I said, most people will never use that feature.
Add Crop Marks adds crop marks to a Finale or MusicProse PostScript file. Crop Marks show a printer where the page boundaries are. For anyone that generates Linotronic output from Finale, you know it’s a real pain that those programs don’t handle these automatically.
Just choose this menu item and open a Finale or MusicProse PostScript file. Supply a name for the new file (the one with crop marks in it), and click OK.
Before doing that, however, you should set the Crop Mark Options in the menu item below it. Most important is the page size, which indicates the size of the Finale or MusicProse page. If this information isn’t set correctly, your crop marks will not position correctly on the music. If you compiled the PostScript file in a Landscape orientation (as opposed to Portrait), click the Landscape cleck box so that it’s on.
Crop Mark Margin is the ‘gutter’ around the page of music in which the program draws the crop marks--printers call it the ‘bleed region.’ Crop Mark Length specifies the length of the crop marks, and Crop Mark Offset specifies the distance between the crop marks and the edge of the music. The Length and the Offset together should not be greater than your margin. The little diagram at right adjusts to show you what each control does.
I hope this utility makes someone else’s life a little easier. If it does please send the requested funds as detailed below. Comments and suggestions welcome.
Tim Herzog
Shareware: $20.00
You may give Illustrious Music to anyone and everyone you know, as long as this documentation accompanies it. You may NOT sell Illustrious Music alone or as part of any package without my express written permission.
Change History:
1.0
First public release
1.1
Fixed some bugs that resulted in lines not coming out in the correct width or not appearing at all. Dashed lines were especially a problem, but it’s all been taken care of now.
Changed the thermometer in the conversion status dialog to something a bit more entertaining.
Fixed the offsets for objects in Illustrator files so that they SHOULD center on the page correctly.
The About box now appears when you choose About Illustrious Music…
1.2-1.3
Fixed the size of the Crop Mark Options dialog
Fixed a bug that resulted in a bomb when you opened any dialog box on an SE with an additional Radius display.
Fixed a ‘bug’ that resulted in strange line widths after the file was saved once in Illustrator. It was actually a bug in Illustrator, but it’s all over now.
Converter now supports outline and shadow styles in Finale. Outline characters come out as stroked characters with the width dependent on what you set in the PS Variables box in Finale. Shadow characters come out as outline characters with filled characters underneath them and offset slightly. You will notice that if you use outline or shadow styles, each character is different. That’s because Finale does not draw this kind of text as one text block, rather as the individual characters you see.
1.4: Added encoding vectors to the Illustrator files so that high-bit ASCII characters such as N-dashes and M-dashes come out correctly.
1.5: Fixed a bug that caused the Set Conversion Options… dialog to bomb when opened.
