Getting started

These guides will help you create JW Lua scripts to use with Finale. More specifically, they’ll help you create great scripts for the JW Lua Scripts repository. That way, you can build scripts faster, and help other Finale users find them.

There are several benefits for contributing to this project:

1. No need to reinvent the wheel. We have an extensive and growing standard library that includes many of the most common functions you’ll need, such as transposition, position calculation, SMuFL font decoding, and much more.
2. Easy sharing and distribution. Just by adding your scripts to the repository, they’ll automatically be shared with the rest of the community. Other Finale users will be able to search and download your scripts from this website. You won’t need to setup anything.
3. See plenty of examples. There aren’t a ton of example scripts out in the wild, but this is the largest open-source collection of JW Lua scripts. You can easily learn how to do almost anything by looking through other’s scripts.

As you start contributing, just remember that you can always get help.

To contribute, you’ll need a GitHub account. We use GitHub to collaborate on the code. Think of Google Drive or Dropbox but for code. If you don’t have a GitHub account, you can sign up here.

If you’ve never used Git or GitHub before, that’s ok. These docs will walk you through most of the process of using them with this repository. However, there are some great resources for learning Git and GitHub out there.

Next, learn how to add scripts to this repository.

> Note: All scripts added to the repo will have a CC0 license. See LICENSE for specific terms. This is to encourage widespread use and encourage other JW Lua coders to build off your scripts.