JW Freeware Plug-ins Wiki

• The JW Lua user interface.
• Tutorial - how to set up an existing (harp gliss) script.
• FAQ for Users

• Script programming in JW Lua
• How to read the PDK Framework documentation
• Enigma string syntax
• Dialog programming with finenv.UserValueInput()
• Dialog programming with FCCustomWindow/FCCustomLuaWindow
• Script Parameters
• FAQ for Developers
• Documentation change requests for developers

• Some quick script examples in JW Lua
• Some larger fully-featured scripts in JW Lua

• Info about the JW Lua mailing list
• Download Link for Beta Versions
• JW Lua clips on YouTube
• FinaleScript vs. JW Lua

JW Lua is a plug-in that can run text scripts in Finale. These scripts will behave as fully-featured plug-ins. No additional software will be necessary to develop the plug-ins.

You can run scripts written by yourself, or just use the plug-in to run scripts by others.

JW Lua is based on the “industry-standard” script language Lua.

There are so many script languages available, why use Lua?

Since I (Jari) nowadays have a pretty fully featured and stable PDK Framework for Finale plug-in development in C++, I was looking for a good script solution to be able to access that functionality with an faster approach than C++ compilation. Lua is a script language specially designed to connect well to C/C++. It's widely used in application development (such as the computer game industry and the mobile phone software market), since it's very small, fast and efficient to get the job done fast. Lua can very easily be tailor-made to suit the host program's scripting needs. The execution speed is extremely fast compared to other script languages. One of Lua's strength is to be efficient when browsing through data, which in my experience is what a large part of plug-in development is.