Two utilities by John Gibson, NightCustomizer and NGtoAI, are shipped with Nightingale.

• NightCustomizer is an easy-to-use program that allows customizing Nightingale in hundreds of ways. For example, all of the settings in the “General” and “Engraver” screens of Nightingale’s ‘Preferences’ command are accessible in Customizer, but so are dozens of similar and not-so-similar settings. Customizer lets you change anything in the list of instruments the ‘Instrument’ command in Master Page uses: you can modify and delete existing instruments or add new ones. Customizer lets you change the keyboard shortcuts for items in Nightingale’s tool palette. It lets you make the staff lines on the screen solid instead of gray. There’s a lot more, but this should give you the idea.

Customizer’s settings are stored in the “Nightingale Prefs” file, located in the Preferences subfolder in your System folder. (For the technically-minded, NightCustomizer is actually a special-purpose resource editor for Nightingale’s user-editable resources. You can do anything it does with a general-purpose resource editor such as Resorcerer® or ResEdit, but Customizer is almost always easier.)

An important thing to remember: you must quit Nightingale before starting NightCustomizer, or Customizer won’t be able to access the Prefs file. 

• NGtoAI is much more specialized, and most Nightingale users should never need it. It’s a simple utility that converts PostScript files saved in Nightingale into Adobe Illustrator 88 format. The resulting files can be opened in Adobe Illustrator, where they behave as if they were actually created with Illustrator. Since Illustrator is a powerful drawing program, this makes it possible to do almost anything you want with the music. For example, non-parallel staff lines, as used by George Crumb, are a snap. (If you simply want to put together pages containing music and images from word-processing or graphics programs, an easier way is to save PostScript in EPS format in Nightingale: EPS files can be used by PageMaker, Quark Xpress, FreeHand, and numerous other programs, including Illustrator.)