If you use Finale at all, you might be interested in this program. Otherwise, you won’t. ART Music can convert EPS files from Finale v2.6.3 to v3.5.2, as well as Finale Allegro files, to Adobe Illustrator format. In Illustrator, you can edit the page (add color, reshape slurs or staff lines) just as if you’d created it yourself.
And now a word from the lawyers…
This software is a copyrighted work, it is not and never has been in the public domain. You may use this software to evaluate its usefulness if your evaluation is strictly for private and non-commercial use. You may give a copy of this software to another individual if you include the software's README file and all other related software materials. This software may not be sold, incorporated into other products, or in anyway commercially exploited without prior written consent of the author. If you want to continue using this software beyond your evaluation, please send $20.00 to the address listed below.
TWO BITS WORTH MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, REGARDING THE SOFTWARE PACKAGE DESCRIBED BELOW, ITS MERCHANTABILITY, OR ITS FITNESS FOR ANY PARTICULAR PURPOSE. YOU ASSUME THE ENTIRE RISK OF USING THE SOFTWARE, INCLUDING ANY LOSS OR DAMAGE OF DATA OR MATERIALS RESULTING FROM ITS USE. THE EXCLUSION OF IMPLIED WARRANTIES IS NOT PERMITTED BY SOME STATES. THE ABOVE EXCLUSION MAY NOT APPLY TO YOU. THIS WARRANTY PROVIDES YOU WITH SPECIFIC LEGAL RIGHTS. THERE MAY BE OTHER RIGHTS YOU HAVE WHICH VARY FROM STATE TO STATE.
Written by Tim Herzog
Produced by Two Bits Worth
778 Hague Avenue
Saint Paul, MN 55104
(612) 227-2920
Email: shareware@2bitsworth.com
Make checks payable to Two Bits Worth
A utility that performs several PostScript functions in conjuction with Finale.
ART 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.
ART Music does the following:
• Translates Finale EPS files to Illustrator 3.0 format (this is the big, cool feature).
• 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 ART Music and choose the Convert EPS File command from the menu. Open the EPS file you just saved in Finale. ART 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, ART 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.
You can also specify that you want all the text or all the lines and shapes to be locked in the Illustrator file. This makes it easier to work with the file because certain elements will be uneditable unless you unlock them.
The ‘Connect Adjacent Shapes’ option compensates for a shortcoming in Finale: when Finale draws shapes that consist of more than one line (like a bracket or tuplet), it does so by drawing two or more distinct lines. When you open the Illustrator file, these lines appear as separate objects, which must be joined (with the Join command) to be edited properly. If this option is selected, ART Music performs the join automatically. However, with some objects, notably the 8va and 8vb brackets, the join will NOT be performed. This is because Finale draws the ‘hook’ with no dash while the horizontal line is drawn dashed. Thus, the two lines cannot be joined.
The ‘More Accurate Beams’ options causes ART Music to widen beams by 1/2 the width of the stem; otherwise, it places the left and right edges directly on the stems and strokes the beam by the width of the stem. The latter is easier to work with in Illustrator, but the beams will be thicker vertically by the width of the stem. With this option on, printing will be more accurate, but in Illustratrator, it will appear as if the beams are a bit off (unless you zoom in to 1600% in Preview mode).
You can specify a Page Setup to be used in the Illustrator file. Click the Include Page Setup checkbox and click the Specify button to set your page setup. If you leave this option off, ART Music defaults to a letter-size page on the Laserwriter.
If “Drag & Drop Overwrites Existing Files” is on, files will automatically be overwritten when EPS files are converted via drag and drop. See “Drag & Drop Support” below.
Lastly, you can pick the file creator for the resulting Illustrator file. The file creator determines what program the Finder launches when you double-click the file’s icon. Click one of the “Save With File Creator” radio buttons or enter your own file creator in the text box provided.
Something 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.
Drag & Drop Support
Under System 7, ART Music now lets you drag EPS files onto the ART Music icon to automatically convert them to Illustrator format (like the Convert File command). You can also drag a folder’s icon to convert all EPS files in that folder (but not subfolders). When you convert a file via drag & drop, ART Music takes the .eps off the end of the EPS file name (if any), adds .ART, and saves the Illustrator file in the same folder as the EPS. If there is already a file by that name, the file will be overwritten if “Drag & Drop Overwrites Existing Files” is selected in the Conversion Options dialog box. Otherwise, you will be asked whether you want to overwrite the file or not.
I hope this utility makes someone else’s life a little easier. If it does please send the requested funds as detailed above. Comments and suggestions welcome.
Tim Herzog
Shareware: $20.00
You may give ART 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.
Update Notes:
3.0.1b: Upgraded the Illustrator output format to Illustrator 3.0 (ART Music previously wrote in Illustrator 88). Illustrator 5.0 was having troubles reading 88 files, and the result was that the line widths were erratic. This means that ART Music is no longer compatible with Illustrator 88.
3.0.1c: Point conversion is now more accurate, i.e., identical to the original Finale file. Earlier versions had rounding problems that often resulted in misaligned stems and beams. NOTE: Due to the way Finale draws barlines, Illustrator MAY not display them correctly, and it will look as if the staff lines are sticking through the barlines. This seems to be a screen display problem on Illustrator’s part: the printouts I’ve seen look fine. In any case, there’s not a whole lot that ART Music can do to compensate, since the problem is due to the way in which Finale is drawing the barlines.
ART Music now scans the EPS file to make sure that you didn’t accidentally include Petrucci or Seville in the EPS listing. This was causing major problems if you did this and ART Music wasn’t looking specifically for that problem.
This version fixes a bug that caused the program to abort if your EPS file had a piece of text that contained a single backslash character (\).
3.0.1d: Added the “Connect Adjacent Shapes” option as explained above.
ART Music now looks at text strings to see if they’re empty and omits them if they are. This should reduce the number of redundant points you get in Illustrator, particularly concerning headers and footers.
ART Music now strokes beams so they line up better with the stems.
3.2: This version is compatible with Finale 3.2 and Finale Allegro. It also added Drag & Drop support and the File Creator feature as described above.
3.2.1: Previous versions relied on the %%Creator: line in the EPS file to determine if Finale generated the file or not, which caused a problem if Coda or users renamed their Finale program. This version now looks elsewhere in the file to determine if Finale created it or not.
3.2.1b: Changed to FAT version (runs native on PowerMacs). The Preferences file is now called “ART Music Prefs.” ART Music looks for the old name “IM Prefs” and renames the file if necessary. Changed the About box presentation.
3.2.1c: Fixed a bug in 3.2.1b that caused crashes when dragging and dropping folders onto ART Music. Hopefully no 3.2.1b’s got off the bulletin boards...
3.5: Maintenance release to maintain compatibility with Finale 3.5.
3.5.1: Makes PostScript font analysis more memory efficient. In previous versions, ART Music would bomb on systems with many, many fonts installed.
3.5.2: Fixed a bug that resulted in a Syntax error for some files. Fixed a bug that caused ovals drawn in the Shape Designer to be vertically displaced by half their width.
3.5.3: Added the “More Accurate Beams” checkbox. Fixed a bug that would cause ART Music to crash if you “dragged and dropped” a file when ART Music wasn’t yet running.
3.5.3c: 3.5.3 would sometimes crash upon startup on 680X0 machines. This bug has been fixed. Also, ART Music will now operate in the absence of a printer driver selected in the Chooser.
