Preferences
In Igor, each piece has its own set of preferences, controlling every aspect of the piece, from the thickness of slurs, beams and stems and the placement of augmentation dots to such things as paper sizes, titles and subtitles, fonts and playback settings.
The preferences follow the piece and define its "notational universe". Two pieces may have completely different preference settings, they are always kept apart and never affect one another even if you edit them at the same time.
There is also a set of Global Preferences. These are the default settings which are copied to each new piece. If you change the global preferences, each piece you create will get its own unique copy of them. Your old pieces, however, will not be affected at all.
House Looks
This allows you to preserve the formatting of any piece you open in Igor, essential when you are dealing with music from another party; a very common situation for publishers. (It also means that your pieces will always retain their existing preference settings, even if NoteHeads should change the defaults.) Keeping a full set of Igor preferences with each piece also allows you to create a House Look, another important feature for publishers. Just change the global preferences the way you want them, this creates your House Look. You can then apply your preferences to any piece by means of a simple command, and in this way ensure a uniform look.
The Panes
Below is the first pane of the preference editor. There are many subpanes, organised according to topic and/or notational aspect:
