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Shape Designer

You can create your own shapes and symbols in Finale using the built-in Shape Designer. You’ll find this built-in graphics program as easy to use as any standard drawing program. In fact, the Shape Designer is even better, because shapes you create in it can be musically intelligent! They can stretch along with the score, affect playback, or appear in every staff at once.

You might create, for example, a harp pedaling diagram, or a custom barline. You can also design rectangles to use as text enclosures when you’re creating Text Blocks, block rests to serve as multimeasure rests in extracted parts, and special shapes for use as custom stems.

Font changes are saved and read with Shape Libraries. As a result, fonts embedded in shapes created with special characters in the Shape Designer will maintain their appearance when imported into another file

To create a shape for use as a marking in the score, you access the Shape Designer from the Expression tool (see Expressions). (Various other tools access the Shape Designer, too, as described at the end of To enter the Shape Designer.

 

Entering the Shape Designer

Creating a shape

 

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