To me one of the strongest point of Dorico concerning the organisation of music is the flow concept.
To my knowdledge there is no other music notation program allowing whole musicals, operas, songbooks and what not to be in one single document.
I find this feature extremely powerfull and usefull.
But exactly this special feature needs in my view some more consideration because flows can be very different.
- Vertical spacing
Unfortunately I have to “fight” again with the vertical spacing philosophy of Dorico.
The features and the results are great for a lot of situations but as soon as I work with a greater number of flows with completely different number of players (musicals) there are cases where a vertical spacing settings per flow is strongly needed.
Most of the time in my case the critical number is when a flow has 11 staves.
From 12 staves upwards there is in my music mostly no doubt that the music should be shown with only one system per page.
But with 11 staves it begins to be difficult to choose.
Depending on the content it is sometimes better to let Dorico justify the vertical spacing but some other times it is really better to have two systems per page.
At this point it begins to be a quite “amusing” but quite difficult task to find the right setting (combinations of minimal gaps) allowing the 11 staves flows to be either justified or not (and being not too cramped)
I really try hard to find such a setting but this almost impossible (at least for me) and if this settings exist it takes much too much time to find them out.
I finally always end up doing a lot of manual changes which are possibly never so good as if Dorico would calculate by itself if it only could allow different vertical settings for different flows!
Making this tedious manual edits I curse (not really) the developpers for still not having integrated this feature in Dorico!
Thus my question: will someday Dorico allows vertical spacing settings per flow?
- Staff labeling
There is this really great feature allowing to override the staff labelling using a system break.
I find this feature extremely usefull and I use it a lot but … why must this staff labeling change be limited to one system only?
I understand that this is very usefull as it is but very often you may want to change the staff labeling for a whole flow and not only for one system!
In this case you have to insert a lot of system breaks which often leads to a completely different horizontal spacing …
Thus another question : will at some point Dorico allows the staff labelling settings per flow?
- Increasing time
Yes working with flows is great but with a lot of flows working with Dorico becomes unfortunately very very tedious because it takes more and more time and some tiny edits begin to take such a long time that it saddly becomes joy-killing
And no, I really do not need any advice on how to optimize my workflow or my hardware for this, this is an old theme and I guess I know all the suggested tricks by heart!
I think everyone working with a great number of flows know that at some point this is simply a fact that Dorico can be very slow and no tricks can prevent this.
I do not have a question concerning this third point as I know that the developpers are aware of this (how could they not) I simply really do hope that one day more substantial improvements can be achieved in this field because:
at some point one of the great strongness of Dorico turns into a great weakness!