Plug-ins menu

How to get there

Noteman says: If the Plug-ins menu does not appear, you may have done a custom install, or you may have removed or changed the name of the Plug-ins folder in your Finale installation directory. See Finale Installation Details.

The Plug-ins menu is one of Finale's unchanging menus; that is, it appears regardless of which tool is selected.

What it does

Finale plug-ins are “mini-programs” that you can use to extend Finale’s abilities. An wide variety of plug-ins are installed with Finale. Although there is a default location for these plug-ins (see Finale Installation Details), you can specify a different path in the Preferences - Folders dialog box. All plug-ins located in the specified plug-in folder are listed in the Plug-ins menu. The plug-ins included with your Finale installation are already grouped into several subfolders, listed below.

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. Plug-ins that require a selection will notify you if a selection has not been made. Note that plug-ins are not accessible in linked parts; to apply a plug-in to a part, you might consider extracting the part first.

Configuring plug-ins

Noteman says: If you want to customize the appearance of the Plug-ins menu as described here, close Finale before making changes to the folder structure.

The submenus that appear in the Plug-ins menu are determined by the folder structure of the plug-ins directory (see Finale Installation Details for the location of this directory). Because the Plug-ins menu uses the names of subfolders to create the list of submenus, you can easily create your own custom submenus by creating new subfolders. For example, if you want to have Finale group several plug-ins in a submenu called "Piano editing", you would create a folder with that name within the plug-ins directory and move the corresponding plug-ins to that folder.

If there are plug-ins you never use, you can remove them from the plug-ins directory. While this will result in marginally faster performance and less memory usage, we do not recommend deleting plug-ins; rather, move them to a location outside of the plug-ins directory so that Finale does not load them.

See also:

Menus

Plug-in filenames

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Finale 2014 for Windows

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