Plug-ins Menu

How to get there

The Menu will display if you have Finale plug-ins available to your system. Finale ships with a number of plug-ins that are installed for you when you install Finale. Unless you have done a custom install, or removed or changed the name of the Plug-ins folder in your Finale folder, you should see the Menu.

What it does

Finale Plug-ins are small “mini-programs” that you can use to extend Finale’s abilities. We have provided a number of Plug-ins along with Finale for you to use. Plug-ins are placed together in the folder Plug-ins in your Finale folder. A different path can be specified in the Folders section of the Program Options dialog box, reached from the Edit Menu. All Plug-ins are accessed from the Menu. Finale will look in the specified folder for your Plug-ins and list them in the Menu. If you find that the tool bar tends to run off the end of the screen, select Abbreviate File Names in the Other Program Options dialog box to shorten the menu names in the tool bar (select Program Options from the Edit Menu and click the Other Options button).

Plug-ins operate on the entire document or on a specified region. You can select this region with the Selection Tool or with any other tool that supports region selection (such as the Key or Time Signature Tools). Plug-ins that require a selection will notify you if a selection has not been made.

If you are interested in writing your own Plug-ins, visit our website (www.finalemusic.com) for more information on how to write a program to work with Finale. Note: You must be familiar with both programming and Finale, or work with someone who is, to be able to write Plug-ins successfully.

 

Note: Plug-ins are not accessible in linked parts. To apply a plug-in to a part, you might consider extracting the part first. See Extract Parts dialog box.

Configurability

The Menu can be configured easily into submenus by placing the plug-ins you would like to have grouped together in a folder included in the plug-ins folder. The Menu then will use the name of the subfolder as the name of the submenu. We’ve added an empty folder named My Favorite Plug-ins, as well as grouped some of the plug-ins into other folders to provide examples. For a list of Plug-in filenames, see Plug-in filenames in the Appendix.

My Favorite Plug-ins

Most of the plug-ins that appear under Finale’s Plug-ins Menu are categorized into submenus such as Expressions, Lyrics, Measures, and others. Each one of these submenus correspond to a folder in the Finale 2009\Plug-ins folder located on your hard drive.

You can customize Finale’s Plug-ins Menu by navigating to this folder and dragging the plug-in files to the “My Favorite Plug-ins” folder for easy access to frequently used plug-ins. Or, create new folders for additional categories. You can find a list of each plug-in’s filename in the Appendix of the User Manual.

Expressions

FinaleScript

Lyrics

Measures

Miscellaneous

Note, Beam and Rest Editing

Playback

Scoring and Arranging

TG Tools

See Also:

Menus

 

image\btn_Table_of_Contents64.gif