Added pages not in any flow, and other flow woes

I would really appreciate some advice regarding the attached project, which is a piece for narrator and chamber orchestra. The full details of my difficulties are contained in text boxes within the project, but in short they have to do with the consequences of adding pages at the start of a project, and that operation’s effect upon flows. But there are also other questions, e.g. about the nature of flows within music frames. This screenshot, for example, shows how flow no. 1 for some reason appears after the additional pages, on which I placed text and music frames:

Ceffyl y Sêr, experiment frames.dorico (3.2 MB)

When you start a project with the default Full Score layout, Dorico displays the default Flow within the MA frame chain - you can see this if you go into the Frames submode of Engrave mode:

As you can also see, on the MA frame chain the Flows filter in the top left corner is set to show All Flows, meaning that if you add a second Flow or a third Flow they will appear within the MA frame chain in the score Layout. If the flow(s) grow to fill a page and then you keep adding more music to the flow, the MA frame chain will automatically create a new page that also uses the MA frame chain, and seamlessly start filling that page. This is where the chain part comes into it - it’s a series of frames all chained together. As to the naming, the “M” in “MA” refers to the old name for Page Template Frame Chains, which was Master Page Frame Chains - Steinberg have decided to drop naming systems that refer to masters and slaves, for obvious reasons. And the “A” indicates it’s the first chain of its kind.

When you draw a Music Frame manually, Dorico automatically assigns it to a new frame chain, this time an “L” something frame chain (L for layout).

On your first and second pages, you have one frame that’s assigned to the LB chain and two frames that are assigned to the LD chain. So three separate frame chains, each of which has the potential to show any subset of the flows that are assigned to the layout (in Setup mode). So if you’ve got seven flows, with three frame chains you have the possibility of showing each of those seven flows three times. I’d say that each time you create a new frame chain (by drawing a layout frame) you create a carbon copy of each of the Flows in the layout, but that’s not quite true, as they’re the same flows.

Look - if you try editing the last cello note in Storm, it updates in both places:

It’s exactly the same material, being displayed in multiple frame chains.

I think the main area in which you’ve stumbled here is that you’ve left the MA chain - the default one - showing all of the flows including the little snippets you’ve already handled manually. This is easily handled from the Page Template Editor (previously known as the Master Page Editor) - given this is the MA chain we’re dealing with. Go into the Page Template Editor - either the Default First or Default Default page, and use the filter at the top to deselect the Flows you’ve already handled manually:

When you apply and close, you’ll find that those flows no longer appear in the MA chain (which starts on the third page shown here):

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Leo - this is a master class, indeed. Many thanks for going so many extra miles in explaining things in such detail.

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My current thinking is that whenever possible, when I want to create an esoteric page layout, I create a new custom page template so I can move it along with its contents if I find I need to add extra pages for any reason.

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Leo - Thank you indeed. The step I keep forgetting is that you can only filter the MA chain by editing the page template. (I do this so rarely that every time it crops up it appears as a new problem!)

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