I’ve looked through this forum and in what I could find of Dorico’s teachings on this subject, and yet I haven’t found a solution. When I add or sometimes later subtract blank pages to be included before my music in a score, Dorico changes the spacing formatting of my score that follows.
I haven’t found a good reason for this, nor a workaround if you don’t want it to happen.
Am I correct – this is intentional that formatting is associated with specific pages and not with specific music? (I don’t understand how/why that would be)
It seems like the consensus has been: it’s not Dorico’s preferred workflow to add/subtract initial pages for titles, program notes, texts, translations, etc., AFTER you’ve already done manual edits to your music, so you should have thought of doing that stuff earlier.
Have there been any updates on this more recently, like in the latest versions of Dorico?
I often don’t know exactly how much frontmatter I’m going to want/need before my score formatting is finished. It’s frustrating that, at least with my current level of knowledge, I have to go back and manually reapply all of my spacing edits for my full score after every page change to the frontmatter.
I put front matter at the end of the file in a separate “title” layout, numbered separately (in lower case Roman numerals) and later move it to the front by editing my PDF export.
Generally you don’t need to make manual staff spacing adjustments. If you do, make sure your layout is already defined and the pages remain the same, before making the last manual staff spacings required.
If you would like to upload your Dorico Project, we can give advices on how to proceed in an optimal way (maximising the usage of global options).
But do you see how this isn’t really a solution? The documentation is basically saying “well, just don’t do that”. There are so many “you better do it this way first and then do the other thing next” processes it seems in Dorico’s workflow, it makes it hard to keep them all mentally so you don’t get screwed later.
Basically there is one big suggestion: use global options first and as much as possible & use manual overrides only at the very end and so sparsely as possible. Using global options makes sure that the workflow stays non linear (you can change them at any point and everything
will auto adjust).
I see what you’re saying. Change global options, and then Dorico’s default “we’re going to change the spacing back to what it was” setting won’t upset your music.
But there are many times that this is not really the solution. Changing things globally solves certain problems, but often creates others – which then require manual overrides.
This conversation isn’t really dealing with the issue of: why does Dorico make your spacing settings go back to where the default says they should be? Shouldn’t there be a way for that to NOT be the case?
May I ask why you need those ‘front matter’ pages in the Dorico file? Perhaps you have some active references or ‘live connections’ to the music e.g. table of contents with page numbers? If so, I understand it. If the front matter is ‘stand-alone’, make it in an external software. Even Word or something similar would work.
Front matter typically has separate page numbering (if any) using lowercase roman numerals (i, ii, iii, …), and the main matter has 1, 2, … so once the music is ‘set’, you will not really need any dynamic page numbering in a table of contents.
Right. I guess this was always the solution with Finale, so it seems like it’s also basically the solution in Dorico. I guess I thought Dorico could/would make this plausible, but it may not do it in a way that is generous to the creators.
There are probably technical limitations. No other program I’ve used reformat/resets pages when inserting/deleting pages, but I assume that the inner workings of Dorico is very advanced and require some functional ‘cuts’.
I don’t think it is a major drawback in Dorico. I primarily see it as an engraving software at which it excels. There are much better, and more stable, software to create the full edition or book. Even MS Word, which I’m certainly no fan of, would work well to make a good looking edition.
Ok yes. That’s likely it. Though in this forum, I think some of the higher ups said this was a known issue they would want to work on – all the way back in 2021. Thank you for at least acknowledging that some sane person would actually want the software to work this way. Dorico users who are offering help in general seem often bent on blaming the user for anything/everything, rather than acknowledging that, given how great Dorico is in so many ways, there may be inexplicable issues in certain areas that hopefully would be worked on someday. To me, in this instance, given Dorico does have robust global features settings, if the software realized the composer/editor had made overrides to certain systems of the score, shouldn’t the default be to assume those were intentional, even given global settings that may differ – rather than a “well, we’re just going to re-impose the global settings now, since they’ve added a blank page up front”?
Many users would likely value Dorico as a ‘complete’ production tool, ‘from cover to cover’. A user should never be blamed for asking why something that looks similar to product A does not behave like product A. (Although we cannot expect Dorico to be a copy of Sibnale or feature the power of InDesign.) The reason might be valid and technical, but it could be explained in the manual (to some extent, without diving into full technical considerations and programming), possibly with a user-friendly solution. A user will probably apply their previous experiences to anything new, but as many soon discover, Dorico is not always like ‘the rest’. There might be ‘political’ reasons at Steinberg that the manual does not bring attention to this. But we have the excellent forum at least.
It seems like ‘book production’ is a topic that many are interested in, as evidenced by the recent thread by @aleos . Hopefully we will see more ‘book like’ functions in future versions. E.g., I know that DS is (was?) very proficient with Adobe FrameMaker (writing the manual for Sibelius), and many clever solutions in FrameMaker could be brought to Dorico in a future version, making book design much easier.
Also have a look at @benwiggy’s posts (I don’t recall the title) about exporting text as CSV to build a table of contents. It’s a very clever and practical function when it comes to ‘books’. I use the CSV export often for many things, such as creating a table of contents and proofreading. It was a great addition to Dorico.
Perhaps a ‘white paper’ should be written about how to make books using Dorico. There certainly seems to be an interest in the topic.
