I think I remember from somewhere/someone that this was a member of the Stockhausen team, when he first started having his scores done by computer. I don't really like angled flags any more than curly ones.

It certainly won't install straight in, r: as yet I can't see any obvious workaround, but I'll try for a bit longer. Hh will probably suss it in an instant....

You're an angel Mr Dough.

They're not actually straight straight though are they? They certainly don't come out like I was expecting:



I imagine it's fairly easy to replace the set with the kind of flags that Richard seems to use, but it will take a little bit of graft at the initial stages.
It may well make a friend of mine (for whom I'm copying a load of his music into Sibelius) very happy though.

A notation & software anorak (with burning ears) reappears very, very briefly to say ...

Richard:  if you want your computer notated scores to look like your handwritten scores, you need Finale.  But you also need to be prepared to fight the software (as one does  ).  It'll allow you to produce scores & parts that look like you want them to look, but the learning curve is extremely steep.

Sibelius does what it says on the tin -- it's easy and it's direct.  You'll be able to produce feasible parts out of the box, and they'll look more or less like what average orchestral players want to see.  (To be fair, the same is now true of Finale, as well.)  Sibelius thinks it's much, much smarter than you are, and it thinks it knows what your scores should look like, and it's rather cumbersome to adjust those presets, as hh's demonstration shows (all that work was done for a single bar, if I'm reading it correctly.  How many bars is your orchestra piece?).  There are available workarounds in Sibelius, but my own experience has been that Finale is a substantially more flexible and powerful piece of software when it comes to engraving -- it's actually possible to get it to look like you want it to look like.  (I've been amused to see this whole exchange about straight flags, for example.  I've been using straight flags for a decade now in Finale w/o any trouble at all.)

The defaults (particularly w/ regard to spacing!) are appallingly bad for both programs -- given that, I'd say that the decision would have to be based on the flexibility the program offers to undo those defaults.


As far as I can tell, my scores couldn't be created in Sibelius.  The full score of the snippet Ollie posted can be seen here.  Useful to see what the whole discussion of controlled bar widths actually looks like in practice.  Surely some of the expert Sibelius users here could produce this score -- the question is how labor-intensive the process is.



Sincerely hope you're all well!

Back to my cave.   

I've forwarded the URL for this thread to a friend who does beta testing for Sibelius and has written a few quite large plugins.  You never know...

NB

Or that someone else has needed in a hurry (thanks Ollie! ).

As you were, gentlemen - I'm reading with eyes peeled but don't have any experience of my own to contribute.

Richard, an additional plus for Sibelius may be the very practical one that if your piece is going to be handled by inputters/editors other than yourself (part extractions for example), they're more likely to be familiar with it than with Finale (at least in this country). I'd have thought it was worth checking what expertise exists in either program with your publisher if that's the case... (I know that my publisher has no-one readily on hand to work in Finale, so more or less insists on Sibelius-processed scores these days.)

Oh! And hello there, Stranger Cassidy!