I’m pleased to announce a new release of the Fingering Diagram Builder.
One thing I wanted to do in this release is give something back to the very generous and sexy people who have been kind enough to use the PayPal donation link to show their support over the years, so I’ve added some special exclusive features for donors. Most of those features are geared toward those doing large or involved projects, such as for publication.
To be clear, none of the old features have been put behind a paywall, and with this release and future releases I’ll keep working on improvements for the free users, too. And you can get the donors-only features with a one-time donation of literally any amount of your choice. (If you’ve donated before, you can try the “Are you a previous donor?” link to activate your special features, but you might have to email me so I can fix it for you manually, especially if your donation was a few years ago.)
Anyway, here’s what’s new:
- Some weird/cool new key sets like Kingma-system flutes, the Redgate oboe, and the Contraforte. I’m flying a little blind on those since I don’t exactly have those instruments laying around, so if you’re an expert let me know what tweaks are needed.
- Downloads in .gif format (in addition to the previously-available .png and .tif). For some purposes .gifs won’t look as nice as .pngs, but the file sizes are very compact, which is useful in some situations. And for donors, you can also download in .svg format, which gives you basically unlimited scalability with no loss of image quality. .Png and .svg downloads also now get lossless compression, which you can turn off if for some reason you want to.
- Diagrams can be rotated 90° in either direction. Donors can also mirror them, which I think is a strange idea but lots of people have requested it.
- Image backgrounds can be white (like before), or now also transparent.
- Some more flexibility for donors: finer control of image size and line thickness, and an editable color palette. Donors also have some new options for how images are cropped.
- You can still, as before, let the FDB automatically provide unique filenames for your downloaded images or name each one manually. But now you can also type placeholders: %i to auto-insert the name of the current instrument, %k for the key set, and %c for an auto-incrementing counter. It’s hard to explain, but try it out and I think you’ll see it’s pretty easy and useful.
- In addition to downloading images to your device or uploading to Dropbox, you can also post them to Imgur. That gives you quick-and-easy shareability of images on all the social media sites, and you don’t need to create an account or anything.
- People have been rightfully baffled for years by the powerful but undocumented “Keywork details” thing. That hasn’t gone away, but many of the instruments now have a more user-friendly interface for turning certain keys on or off. I hope to add to and refine these interfaces in response to the continuing frustrated emails. It has also become abundantly clear that, while I’ve tried to make everything as intuitive as possible, it’s time for a help page.
- The FDB can, if you like, remember the fingering you were working on in a previous session. (This feature is turned off by default.) I don’t expect that many people need multiple visits to the FDB to complete one fingering diagram, but it’s handy if, say, you accidentally navigate away.
- Once again, a thorough visual refresh and lots of little interface tweaks.
- This one is boring but important: basically a ground-up rebuild of the FDB’s guts, using smarter coding than I knew how to do nearly nine years ago when I first released it. (For the code-savvy, I’ve replaced my spaghetti jQuery code with slightly-less-pasta-like Vue.js code.) That will hopefully help keep it running reliably and maintainably on modern web browsers for the better part of another decade.
Please do check it out, and send me your bug reports and other feedback.
On the bassoon diagram, when hovering over the headings for upper or lower half holes (not individual keys, but the complete heading) I would expect to see all of them to display, like the individual ones do when you hover over them. It would give me a better idea what that option looks like at a glance.
I would really think putting the Contraforte as it’s own instrument would be preferred. The keywork system is just too different. I kinda get the contrabassoon being wrapped in with the regular bassoon, but with the thumb key system being so different I would advocate for that being a second instrument too, otherwise you rely on the user to make a custom keyset that’s designed for contra.
While it might seem redundant, I would advocate for adding the second low C as an option, since this is a standard key for many European players and allows for a few custom fingerings for passagework and might be useful if discussing the particular use of that key.
Another key that’s not so common but might be nice to have is the alternate C-sharp key. There are several mechanical ways of doing this but the button is always in the same place. This is the C-sharp key that is above the low C key to the left of the low B, operated by the left thumb. https://www.foxproducts.com/pro-bassoon-keywork-options/ “Alternate Low C♯ Mechanism”
I still think your placement of the right hand E-flat key doesn’t accurately represent what it looks like on the instrument.