reference.book Page 401 Monday, August 31, 2009 2:47 PM
5.6 Display settings By choosing from the Edit textures for menu you can set the textures for the Score, Parts, editing Ideas, and viewing read-only Versions independently. There are some fun textures to choose between – try Tiger skin for your desktop, or Paper, coffee-stained for your paper if you’ve been up all night writing music! Perhaps more useful is the Paper, graph texture, which is very good for visually aligning objects in your score – the grid lines are 1 space apart when viewed at 100%. If screen redraw seems particularly slow, try switching on the Alternative texture drawing option in this dialog, then quit and restart Sibelius; this may make Sibelius faster on some computers, but slower on those with limited memory. (This option is not available on Mac when smoothing is switched on.) If screen redraw is still slow, you will probably find that switching textures off (by setting the options to Use color, not texture) makes screen redraw quicker.
Smoothing On Windows, you can set how and to what extent Sibelius should smooth the appearance of your score as it appears on your display by choosing File Preferences and selecting Display. You can choose a smoothing preset from the Settings menu (Sibelius will use Smooth and Fast by default), or you can change the settings individually, i.e. whether or not to smooth Slurs and ties, Beams, Angled lines (e.g. hairpins) and Straight lines (e.g. staff lines). Smoothing of symbols and text can either be switched off, use the system default or be switched on. The system default can be changed by clicking the Effects button on the Appearance page of your system’s Display properties. (Choose Start Settings Control Panel and double-click Display.) On Mac, Sibelius uses Mac OS X’s built-in Quartz display, which is always beautifully smooth. No options are necessary for Quartz display, so the Smoothing options do not appear on Mac.
Speed tips Here are a few ways you can improve the speed at which Sibelius runs on your computer: If dragging the paper seems slow, try Alternative texture drawing or switch off the paper and
desk textures (see Textures above). You could also try changing the smoothing level and color depth, and switch on Translucent Windows. On Windows, using Adobe Type 1 (PostScript) versions of the Opus, Reprise, Inkpen2 and Helsinki fonts can also slow down the time it takes to redraw the screen – so wherever possible use TrueType fonts. (These are installed by default, so unless you’ve specifically changed the fonts Sibelius should use, you don’t need to worry about this.) 401
Power tools
You can even add your own textures to Sibelius if you like – just create a folder called Textures inside your computer’s application data area (see User-editable files on page 656), and drop some suitable Windows bitmap (BMP) files into it. When you next run Sibelius, the new textures will be available on the Textures page of the File Preferences dialog.