If you are trying to determine the number of racks that fit on a rooftop or barge, you can draw and measure the available area in the rack layout view and then arrange your racks in that area to see if they fit. That only works if the racks in the rack layout view have the same physical dimensions as they do in the real world. While the default physical dimensions of racks in Finale 3D are usually close since they are based on the size and number of tubes, they likely aren’t exactly right. In some cases, like the cake racks shown in Figure 1, they may be way off. The “Edit physical specifications…” context menu item for racks provides a solution.
Figure 1 – Slice cake racks and 2×2 cake racks that have the same footprint dimensions but fit very different size cakes.
The “Edit physical specifications…” dialog, shown in Figure 2, has fields for the footprint width and length of the rack in millimeters. Both types of racks in Figure 1 have the same overall width and length, but the slice cake racks have a single row of 10 cake slots, whereas the 2×2 cake racks have two rows of two cake slots, resulting in the different appearance.
Figure 2 – Specify the physical dimensions of racks, and the distance between them when snapped together, in millimeters.
The “Gap between racks (mm)” field sets the spacing for snapping and for the default rack layout in the rack layout view.
Rack colors
The “Rack color (6-digit hex number RRGGBB)” field sets the color of the rack, expressed as a hexadecimal number like FF0000 for full intensity red or FFFF00 for full intensity yellow. Full intensity rack colors contrast poorly with the colors of the pin numbers in the circles. For a better result, washed out colors that have all three color components in the range 90 to E0 tend to look better. For example, you could try A0D0A0 for green, which has hexadecimal D0 for the green component and the lower hexadecimal number A0 for the red and blue components.