Mirror menu

How to get there

Choose the Mirror tool . The Mirror menu appear in the menu bar at the top of the screen.

What it does

• Dragging Copies Music. In this copying mode, the copy you create is not an intelligent copy (a mirror) of the source measure or measures - just the music as if it were copied with the Selection tool normally.
• Dragging Mirrors Measures. In this copying mode, the copy you create is an intelligent copy (a mirror) of the source measure or measures. If you edit the notes in the source measures, the change is immediately reflected in the mirrored measures. To guarantee the measures stay identical, you are unable to edit or copy anything into a measure which has a mirror applied to it. When you no longer want the measures to be mirrored, choose Mirror > Dragging Copies Music. See also Convert Mirrors.

  The process is exactly the same as any Selection tool copying action: Select a source region of complete measures. Drag the first selected measure so that it's superimposed on the first target measure (or, if the target measure is offscreen, CTRL+SHIFT-click it). Finale displays the Mirror Attributes dialog box, letting you specify a transposition, if you want, and other aspects of the copy.

  You can only create this kind of copy if the target measures are originally empty. Note also that if you're creating a mirror; everything in the source measures will be copied to the target measures. (You can, however, tell Finale not to display certain elements of the music by specifying them in the Don't Draw section of the Mirror Attributes dialog box that appears).

  The result is a copy that's dynamically linked to the source measures. If you change any aspect of the source measures, the mirror automatically changes too. You can change any settings you made in the Mirror Attributes dialog box as follows: click the Mirror Tool, then SHIFT-click any mirror (identified by a mirror icon). Note, too, that you can copy a mirrored measure in the usual way; if you've selected Mirror > Dragging Mirrors Measures, the target measures will themselves be a mirror (of the mirror). If you've selected Dragging Copies Music however, the mirror you're copying will be turned into normal non-mirrored music.