Now that
Sibelius 6 has been launched, there's been
quite a bit of discussion of the
amazing major new features, so I thought it might be useful to give a few details of some of the more subtle but no less valuable improvements that I worked on during the development of Sibelius 6.
Articulation positioning. The new articulation positioning rule in version 6 is great. Stacks of articulations are now automatically split as required across magnetic slur end points, for situations where you have eg. a staccato and a bowing mark on the same note, and you can specify separately which articulations should go inside slurs and tuplets. Each stack can be dragged independently if required; in fact, each individual articulation can be dragged up and down, for those tricky special cases. Staccatos drawn inside the stave should now position correctly in all circumstances, and the various options for determining the vertical distance between notes and articulations now behave more consistently. All of this adds up to a massive improvement for those of us who require the highest engraving quality in their scores.
View > Handles. Making lots of graphical edits in a tight situation, and keep selecting the wrong item by mistake? Need to drag the right hand end of a system, but can't find where to click? Turn on this new option and all the click handles will be visible regardless of whether they are selected.
Dragging things when zoomed in a long way. One of my personal favourite improvements in v6. The threshold beyond which you have to drag in order to start moving an object is now fixed, irrespective of zoom level. This means that you can make fine adjustments with the mouse much more easily than before, because you don't have to drag halfway across the screen to get the thing to budge (and then drag back to the desired position). This has bothered me for years so it was nice to finally get the opportunity to sort it out. You'll also notice that click handles scale up sensibly at high zoom levels, so it's much easier to select a stem end when zoomed right in for example.
Slur subtleties. The slur improvements in v6 are a major selling point by themselves (full control over shape and thickness, more graceful default shape and much improved rule for determining whether they should go above or below the notes). Notice also however that the tapering of angled slurs is much improved in appearance, and that slurs now scale far more attractively on small staves or in cues.
Note-attached arpeggio lines. Adding an arpeggio could be a rather fiddly procedure in previous versions of Sibelius; you had to manually drag it out to the required length, and sometimes even add extra space before the note to allow for the line to fit without colliding. In version 6 this is all handled automatically from a new key on the keypad. These new arpeggios will take up the required space, and will grow and shrink as notes within the chord are added, removed or moved. They can also be fully adjusted manually, both vertically and horizontally, should you require it.
Cautionary accidentals. This doesn't really count, because it's a big feature in its own right, but a "gripe" I've heard from a few orchestral musicians when I tell them what I do for a living is that "Sibelius doesn't do accidentals correctly". This has never been true; the rules are that accidentals expire at the end of the bar in which they are stated, which is how Sibelius has always worked. However, to avoid sight reading mistakes and to reduce ambiguity it's customary to add extra accidentals in confusing situations, such as an F# in one bar followed by an F with no accidental in the next bar. Sibelius 6 does this automatically, and you can comprehensively control the circumstances in which cautionary accidentals get added via a welter of options. Furthermore, Sibelius will now restate accidentals on tied notes that cross a system break.
You can experiment with these and many more improvements by downloading the demo of version 6.
