IWBNI there were an option to display the Euclidean distance between any selected object (e.g. a given smart shape, expression, articulation, or tuplet) and other neighboring objects.

Note: Informally speaking, the Euclidean distance between two objects is the length of the shortest path from one object to another. Formally, for two points p1=(x1,y1) and p2=(x2,y2) in the xy-plane, the Euclidean distance D(p1,p2) equals the square root of the following sum: (x1-x2) squared plus (y1-y2) squared. The Euclidean distance between two sets S1 and S2 is the minimum of D(p1,p2) over all points p1 in the set S1 and p2 in the set S2.

This feature would be useful when one must manually adjust the position of a given object in order to satisfy various constraints that specify that an object of a given type must be a certain distance from other objects. For example, one might wish to nudge a given dynamic expression down by one half-space at a time until the expression is at least 3/4 space from the nearest obstacle (e.g. a tuplet bracket, tuplet number, slur, staff line or accidental), except in the case when the obstacle is an articulation where the expression glyph could be allowed to be as close as .618 spaces from the articulation glyph.

This could be implemented by adding a menu item called Show Distances to the View menu. If the menu item is not selected, distances would not be displayed as in the current version of Finale. Otherwise, indicators would be displayed to show the distances from the boundary of one object to the boundary of other neighboring objects. For example, if both objects are font characters, the distance would be measured and displayed from the glyph (or outline) of one character to that of the other character. (Note: The distance between two characters would not be the distance between two rectangles that circumscribe the glyphs.). Distances could be indicated with a line that shows the shortest straight path from one object to another and such lines could be labeled with numbers to indicate the distance in the units specified by the menu item Options>Measurement Units as shown in the following example where the selected object is a slur and distances have been indicated in units of spaces:

And, as a selected object is moved, all distance indicators would be updated automatically.

Created: July 28, 2000
Last Updated: July 28, 2000
Version: Finale 2000b