Contents:
- SIP Control Center - updates
- SipSib - added features and fixes
- SipToc - the automatic Table of Contents generator (a SipXref extension)
- SipFind - announcement
- SipThema - upgrade
Dear SIP user,
After my vacation which I spent in sunny Lithuania, the new season starts with little news
on the SIP front.
SIP Control Center
Clipboard viewer test
The program checks if the clipboard viewer CLIPBRD.EXE is in the system. As it turns out,
this test is superfluous and has been removed as of SIP build 028.
When you get the warning you can ignore it, or if you want to avoid the message you can request a
solution from support on how to do this.
SipResiz
With the Score item resize program SipResiz it is now possible to modify the size of a
Code09 item in a series of files. Comes in handy if you want all up LV's a little bigger but
that of course is only one of a thousand possible uses.
SipEdit
There is now a 'general tab' where you can make any conditional edit on a series of files.
An example would be: modify all note marks to size 1.1
SipSib news
Seventeen improvements were made in build 024 and 025 of the Sibelius to Score converter. Some
of these have not been requested by users so there is no reason to elaborate on those.
Worth mentioning however are:
- when last converted file not online, disable the 'Show last conversion' button
- big size notes are now supported
- improved vertical positioning of arpeggio and linking of top arrow head
- if no note found for single parentheses, generate as them as characters with comment
- suppression of the 'key signature gap set to' comment if HouseStyle option not set
- introduction of the warning 'Ledger line may not have been used for a note'
- first filename to Font usage report
- fixed double setting of Code01 Par4 to (-)100, and Code01 Par8 stemlength using this
- improved multiple augmentation dot processing
- support of \253 open circle
- improved linkage of accidentals to staff
- improved solitary ties
SipToc - Table of contents generator
SipXref has limited means to produce a table of contents of a series of MUS files. By setting
the 'Titles to summary' option, all titles encountered are given in the summary file with
each file. The information is thus provided for a table of contents but not in a form which
allows easy manipulation of the summary information. The definition of a title is a text item
with a size (Code16 Par6) of 1.5 or greater.
The suggestion came from a user to generate a manageable table of contents automatically.
SipXref has been extended with the SipToc feature to provide a more complete table of contents.
A button has been added to produce such table which can be sorted by title, composer, page
number, or filename. A text file can be produced with the pertinent data in a way which allows
further processing by a text editor.
Characters in titles and composer names will be translated to proper graphics if specific Score
diacriticals (called French accents in the Score help file) are used: %%u becomes ü, etc.
The Latin character set is assumed.
While in the summary, more than one title on a page are stringed together, SipToc recognizes
every title as a separate one.
The elements collected are:
- title: as for the summary, every text of size 1.5 or bigger is considered a title. The
sequence encountered in the MUS file is significant: first come, first served - but the staff sequence top
to bottom is respected.
Note that a
page must have a title to be recognized for the table of contents (just a composer will not
lead to the creation of an entry).
- composer: SIP is not so clever that it can recognize a composer name among text items and
needs a little help. Define the size of the text used for composer name in the SipXref
options and this text is then recognized as such. To be recognized as such, a composer
name must have at least three letters, start with a capital letter, and have at least one
vowel. Vowels are a, e, i, o, u, and y with any of the diacriticals (*) which Score knows.
The composer name is picked up form the cross-reference table and the font size can therefor
be defined after running SipXref.
- page number: the global settings ('Set project options') defines the font, size and placement
of the page number. Only one such number is assumed per page.
- file name: the file extension MUS, PAG, or whatever is disregarded for the table of contents.
- staff number: this piece of information is invisible to the user but it is needed to assure
that when there are more titles on a page, the upper title is presented first, independent
of its occurrence in the MUS file.
Title and filename always exist. Composer name and page number may or may not occur.
For this feature you need to be on SipXref level 9.17 and SIP Control Center v4.00 build
027 or up.
(*) Score can put acute, grave, circumflex and umlaut on all lower and upper case vowels
including y and Y. The latter character in the SipXref generated table of contents can only
properly visualize ý, ÿ, and Ý. The string '~n' is translated to ñ.
Export of the table of contents is a text file named SIPTOC.TXT, formatted as columns or in
CSV (comma separated variables), a format importable by some editors. Use the copy/paste
feature of Windows to move it to the editor of your choice.
Also, there is the export feature in the format of a SipThema parameter file which allows
the immediate execution of that program for a thematic index. The name of the output file
is SIPTHEMA.PAR.
An export feature is foreseen to replace the title by the string 'Nº nnn' where nnn is the
number of the piece.
SipFind announcement
Do you ever use the Windows Find feature because you do not remember exactly in which folder you
stored that document but you know a keyword from it? You let Windows go to thru all your files
and it comes up with a list of files in which you used that particular word.
Now SIP will have such a feature named SipFind to locate MUS files and the elements you can
search for are text, symbols, fonts, etc.
Expected availability is the last week of October 2002.
SipThema upgrade
There is a maximum of 26 incipits which can be generated per page which is one execution of
SipThema. The program did not check for overflow and would generate multiple staves with identical
staff numbers. A check has been incorporated to stop after 26 incipits.
The diagnostic given when the user provided a non-existing staff number was not very clear
and has been changed.
The current version of SipThema is 1.04. If you are not at that level, just request it as
an email attachment.
Policy
As long as I can afford this policy: Licensed users can alway ask me for free updates (as email attachments)
if they are not downloadable.
For SipSib this is valid until April 1, 2003.