Although PrintMusic automatically updates the score layout as you enter music, any measure, staff, system, or page can be resized, dragged or nudged as you see fit. Once you learn a few basic Selection tool and Page Layout procedures, you’ll see how easy it is to ensure a beautiful and precise layout for any score.
To prepare for this lesson, open the document called “Tutorial 4,” which consists of a barbershop arrangement of “Auld Lang Syne.”
For this example, we’ll distribute measures to 4 per line.
You can also select a region of measures and group them in a system using the “Lock Selected Measures Into One System” command in the Fit Measures dialog box.
When we set four measures per system, PrintMusic added an additional system on the next page to accommodate the final measure. Next, let’s move this orphan measure back to the first page.
With any of the Fit Measures commands, the layout depends on your good judgment. Remember, PrintMusic automatically lays out your music with as many measures as it can fit on a line; you’re free to override its placement decisions, but the result may be measures that are too wide or too crowded.
By locking a specific number of measures on a system you’ve
created measure groups, PrintMusic’s system of locking measures
within a system (hence the non-printing lock icon 
).
Be aware that once a measure has been manipulated in this
way, the measures are locked into this arrangement, and they
won’t be affected by future measure-rearranging commands
like Update Layout or Begin a New Staff System. You can remove locked measure groups from the piece by choosing
Update Layout from the Edit menu while pressing Shift.
Let’s turn the first measure of “Auld Lang Syne” into a proper pickup measure. There are several ways to do this, but we’ll show you the easiest. This method changes the first measure in the document into a pickup measure.
As noted earlier in Tutorial 1, Print- Music is automatically applying professional publisher-standard note spacing to your music as you go along. (This feature can be turned off by deselecting Automatic Music Spacing from the Edit menu.) Automatic Music Spacing not only spaces the notes, it is designed to avoid the collision of chords, lyrics, and other score elements. In most cases, you will never need to worry about this feature. However, you may encounter instances when the music does not appear to be spaced correctly; usually, the automatic spacing hasn’t been triggered yet. Here, then, are the steps to follow to perform music spacing (it has not yet been performed in this score so you can see the effects):
.
key and click just to the left of the bass staff,
in any staff system. Now both staves should be highlighted through
the entire piece.There is one more critical behind-the-scenes function in action here: Update Layout. Again, PrintMusic is configured to perform this function automatically (it can be disabled by deselecting Automatic Update Layout from the Edit menu).
When you use the Music Spacing command, you correct the
spacing of the notes, lyrics, and accidentals of your piece;
PrintMusic still must calculate the effects of your respacing
on the layout of the measures. If you ever notice that measures seem too wide or too narrow, select Update Layout from
the Edit menu, or press 
+U.
To respace staves in individual systems or throughout the score, see To move staves.
The units of measurement PrintMusic normally uses are inches. You can work in whatever units you feel most comfortable with.
. Your page of sheet music is instantly covered
with a series of horizontal and vertical lines with handles attached.
Although this may appear confusing at first, the function of the handles
will become clear as we examine the page in depth.
To view your entire page, click on the View menu, select Zoom, then Fit in Window.
The handles (and their associated lines) control two distinct sets of margins: Page margins, which allow you to determine how much of the page (from side to side and from top to bottom) you will use for the music; and staff system margins, which allow you to indent staff systems, increase the space allotted to systems, and so on. A staff system, or system for short, is one line of music, no matter how many instruments (staves) are in it.
As you've no doubt already guessed, the lines that run to the
edges of the page are the currently defined page margins. The
rectangles that enclose the three systems of music are the staff
system margins. Each system has two handles, one at the upper left corner and one at the lower right corner. To manipulate
any margin, simply drag its handle. You can even dragenclose
margin handles or select all margin handles with
+A). To move the entire system, creating
more space between systems for a choreographer’s note or a
title, simply click on the system and drag it into place.
The page currently appears based on PrintMusic’s default layout settings. You might decide there is some extra space above the top system, we’ll move the music higher on the page.
For precise positioning, from the Page Layout menu, choose Systems and then Edit Margins. Here, you can specify spacing numerically. You will notice the values here change as you drag system margin handles.
The spacing on the page remains the same, but now there is room to move the system up (before colliding with the top page margin). When you do, subsequent systems will reposition uniformly.
PrintMusic can also automatically space the systems evenly down the page with the Space Systems Evenly command. To space the systems, PrintMusic adjusts the Distance Between Systems, without changing the system margins. Because we want to make sure our title doesn’t get covered up when we space the systems later, we’ll make the top system margin bigger to include the title.
You’ve already experimented with the Zoom command in the View menu. This command—and the options on its submenu—allow you to “zoom in” to and “zoom out” from your document, magnifying or reducing your view of it. During the entire process, however, the actual size of the music—the printed image—remains precisely the same.
The Resize tool, however, can resize the music itself.
For this example, use the document called “Tutorial 4” that you’ve been working on to this point and scroll to page 1.
. The amount of music to be resized depends on
where you click on the screen.
NOTE: If you use the Resize tool on a system or a page, as you’ve just done, you change the measure widths. Whenever you perform any operation in PrintMusic that changes the measure widths, you must tell PrintMusic to compensate by rearranging the layout of measures. As noted previously, PrintMusic performs an Automatic Update Layout for you; if you have decided to turn this feature off, you'll need to do it manually now.
The Text tool is used to enter text onto a single page or multiple pages. Titles, subtitles, composer credits, page numbers, copyright notices, and dates are good examples.
For best results, don’t use the Text tool for musical text like Adagio and rehearsal letters. Use the Expression tool for these purposes (see Tutorial 3).
If you create a document using the Document Setup Wizard, you will be prompted for a title. For this tutorial document, we have provided you with a dummy title, “Title.” The word “Title” has brackets around it, to tell you it’s special, a text insert. We’ll talk more about text inserts later in this tutorial.
Now, you’ll add a subtitle to “Auld Lang Syne.”
. The Text menu appears, and the title, “Auld Lang
Syne,” sprouts a small square handle.
(If the text block shows an editing frame, click anywhere on the page to see its handle.) You might want to adjust the vertical position of your subtitle. To delete a text block, click its handle and press Delete.
In addition to entering titles and special instructions to players, the Text tool can also be used to place page numbers into your score, as well as the document name, current date, and current time (important features if you plan to update and reprint your score at some future time). PrintMusic provides several useful keyboard shortcuts for many of these features; let’s explore some of them here.
Note that page numbers are already assigned (starting on page 2) when you start a new score using the Setup Wizard or a template.
+P. This keyboard shortcut
instructs PrintMusic to place a page number insert at the current cursor position.
(You could also select Page Number from the Inserts submenu of the Text
menu.) The number 1 appears, surrounded by a box. The box indicates that
this number is not ordinary text, but a dynamic insert, meaning that if
you created this insert on the second page of your score, it would display
the number 2 instead of the number 1. See Text tool in the User Manual
for a further discussion of inserts.
++] (right bracket).
This keyboard shortcut instructs PrintMusic to align the text block with the
right margin of the page. (You could also select Right from the Placement
submenu of the Text menu.) You have now successfully entered a page number
for your score. We can quickly instruct PrintMusic to display your page number
on every subsequent page, without having to manually enter a different
page number every time.In addition to adding text to your document, you may also wish to include a graphic element (a company logo for example) which has been created in a graphics program. Or, in a totally different vein, you may wish to export a PrintMusic-generated musical example into a word processing application. Both the importing and exporting of graphics is performed with the Graphics tool.
Let’s start by exporting an example of our piece.
. When you selected the Graphics tool, a Graphics menu appeared towards the right side of the menu bar at the top of your screen.
You’ll want to remember where you’ve saved this file for future reference.
The Place Graphic dialog box is where you specify the graphic item you wish to import: in this tutorial we'll use the file you saved moments ago.
If your PrintMusic 2011 folder is not already chosen, select it now.
Since you chose Place Graphic rather than double-clicking where you wanted the graphic to appear, PrintMusic is awaiting instruction for placement of the graphic.
For more information, see the Graphics tool in the User Manual.
There are essentially two kinds of printers that work with PrintMusic: PostScript-equipped printers, suitable for professional publishing; and non-PostScript printers, including inkjet and bubblejet printers.
PrintMusic’s output truly shines when you print on a PostScript printer. PostScript is a page-description language spoken by computers and printers, just as MIDI is a language spoken by computers and MIDI keyboards. (If you want truly typeset-quality printing, you can take your PrintMusic files on a disk to an output shop—something like a copy shop/graphics service bureau—and have it printed on a Linotronic imagesetter, a very expensive PostScript machine that creates published-quality printouts.)
Just as A, B, and C are characters in a standard text font, notes and musical symbols are characters in PrintMusic’s music font, called Maestro. Maestro, and the other fonts that come with PrintMusic, is provided as a Postscript and TrueType font.
All text and musical symbols should look outstanding at any size. However, when you print at reduced sizes, a non-PostScript printer produces unevenly spaced staff lines, slightly “stairstepped” eighth-note beams, or somewhat jagged slurs (because these lines and shapes are actually graphics and not font items).
When You’re Ready to Continue
You’ve learned some very important concepts in this tutorial. In fact, these techniques and principles constitute much of the editing work you’ll need to do in PrintMusic. Here’s a quick review of what you’ve covered, in order:
If you’ve had enough for this session,
choose
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