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## The Editing Window

1. Tool icons in the editing window
2. The active staff
3. Entering text
4. Selecting items
5. Adjusting notes, slurs, ties, triplets, etc.
6. Accessing extra information for an item

A big difference between Songworks 3 and Songworks 4 is that you can now edit either in our traditional left-right "panorama view" or in page view. You'll generally find it more convenient to edit in panorama view, in which all events are clearly laid out left to right in the order of their sounding, but for a large score page view can be quicker because the program is only dealing with one page at a time. You can switch between panorama and page view by clicking the appropiate icon at the upper right of the screen.

Editing of notes is described above in How to enter notes, so here we'll just describe a few extra features found in the score window. Note that all icons in the edit window have a "tool tip" that will pop up if you let the mouse cursor hover over the tool for a few seconds.

1. The music editing window contains at least one staff (it wouldn't make sense to have a music window with none, though you can set a staff to be invisible). There are tools for controlling the position of each staff and its related lyrics, if any, plus an optional line of chord symbols. There is no limit on the number of simultaneous staves, though there is a practical limit on how many voices the computer can easily perform simultaneously while tracking each note position. We've created successful scores with 16 simultaneous staves, which is larger than you are likely to write in most cases.

Each staff has a "handle" at its left. You can drag a staff up or down by grabbing its handle with the arrow tool.

Left of the handle is an info button; click that to see a large selection of options for the staff. You can, for example, use staff options to this to listen to just one or two staves at a time, or to change the notation type (shape notes, stick notation, liturgial notation). And you can set the instrument sound and volume for any staff, and much more.

2. One staff is always the "active staff." Notes entered via the piano keys will appear in whichever staff is currently the active one. You can make a staff the active one either by using the arrow to click on any of its notes or symbols, or by entering a symbol directly in that staff, or by clicking on the "handle" at the left of the staff or anywhere inside the staff. The active staff's "handle" is filled in blue.

If you click the Page View button pictured above, the music appears with some additional controls at its left. These are the staff system controls, which can be dragged up or down to decrease or increase the distance between individual staff systems. The distance between staves within a system is separate, and set by dragging the staff handles.

3. To enter text, choose the text tool ("A") and click where you want the text to appear. An editing window will pop up. Once the text is entered it can be dragged with the arrow tool, and when dragging text you'll see green "lyric lines" appear near the associated staff. If the text is dragged to one of the green lyric lines for that currently active staff, it will follow the notes of that staff, paying attention to syllable divisions marked with spaces or hyphens, and observing any slurs or ties. Remember that text is attached always to a particular staff and will move up or down if that staff is moved. The active staff is always the one whose handle is painted.

4. To select items for editing or deletion, click on the item with the arrow tool. To select a range of staff symbols, click on one side of the area, hold down the shift key, and click on the other side. Or hold down the shift key as you click on several different items. Or use the arrow tool to drag a selection rectangle around the items to select. More on item selection can be found here.

5. Selected notes can be slurred, tied, made into triplets or tuplets, etc. using the action tools palette or the keyboard equivalents. To adjust the shape of a slur, hold down the shift key and click on the slur itself. You'll see three control points appear, and dragging them will change the shape of the curve. Ties have a fixed horizontal curve but you can change the direction of a tie curve by dragging it up or down. Triplets have draggable control points that will appear if you select the first note of the triplet while holding down the Shift key. And the info window for that note has a button that will let you further change the appearance options of the triplet.

6. All items entered in your music have an information window that offers extra control. Just select the item in question and press command-i (Ctrl - i for Windows). These options include even creating nonstandard key signatures or customized meter signatures.

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