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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-US link="#0563C1" vlink="#954F72" style='word-wrap:break-word'><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal>Greetings everyone,<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>I just wanted to introduce myself as I may be posting here quite a lot over the next few days or weeks. My name is Martin. I was brought up in France and England, and since then have lived and worked in Cyprus, America and now England. My wife and I run a small music engraving company that has been in business for 30 years. We started with Finale (version 1.1) and added Sibelius in the mid-1990s, even before there were Mac/Windows versions.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>We work for major U.S. and European classical, popular and educational music publishers.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>All along, we have made heavy use of automation, employing numerous languages. Chronologically, that includes VisualBasic, numerous macro programmes, various Norton solutions, manipulation of native PostScript code to add elements to Finale files that Finale could not do itself, AutoIt! (a solution for accessing the UI of Windows apps), QuickKeys, Applescript, Finalescript, Sibelius ManuScript (hundreds of custom plugins), and Python for the past five years (used mainly to manipulate MusicXML files using the LXML library).<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Despite this extensive experience I remain a self-taught coder with no formal training, so please be gentle! I currently have my nose buried deep in “Programming in Lua” (third edition) as it is a completely new language for me. Several things have been tripping me up, including for example the way Lua uses colons where other languages would use periods (dots). But it’s always exciting to learn a new tool!<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>My best seasonal wishes,<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Martin Marris<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div></body></html>