Edit/Measurement Units

In a number of Finale dialog boxes, you’re asked to specify a measurement: the margins of each page, for example, or the thickness of eighth-note beams. Using the submenu of the Measurement Units command, you can select the measurement unit you want Finale to understand—and display—in all of its dialog boxes.

You’re already familiar with inches and centimeters. Points and picas are typographical measurements; there are 72 points per inch, and 12 points in a pica. EVPU stands for ENIGMA Virtual Page Unit, of which there are 288 per inch.

Select spaces when you want Finale to display spaces as the measurement unit in all the dialog boxes. Although one space is defined as the distance between staff lines, in Finale one space is equal to 24 EVPUs (which is Finale’s default distance between staff lines). Note also that one half-space equals one step, which is one line or space in a staff.

You can override your global choice on a case-by-case basis, however. Just include the units, or their abbreviation, when you type any measurement number into Finale. For example, suppose you’ve selected Inches as your global unit of measurement. When you’re telling Finale how thick you’d like your slurs to be, however, inches may be slightly unwieldy for such a fine adjustment. Therefore, you might type “2 pt.” Finale will automatically convert what you’ve entered into inches.

You don’t have to type out the word “points,” of course. Here are the abbreviations you can enter into any measurement-oriented dialog box:

Note: that, when you’re overriding the global setting in this way, you even have a unit option not available in the Units of Measurement dialog box (millimeters).

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