Hello Team,
I’ve been designing a bespoke hymnal for my parish and have encountered many blessings and a few hindrances in Dorico. As you know, the ‘flow’ concept is positively brilliant in terms of designing a hymnal. Being able to have many hymns in the same project with all the same settings, margins, etc… a time saver to say the very least! The ability to achieve consistency is simply phenomenal. That said, I have noticed a few quirks and have a few requests.
1.) I would love to see dedicated hymn templates for melody only and SATB. Hymnals in the USA seem to be a relatively standard size so I would assume they are elsewhere (I could obviously be wrong about that). This quirk is easily remedied by setting whatever size you want so it’s not a big deal by any means. I was surprised, however, to not see such a template considering some of the more seemingly obscure templates. Again, if nothing comes of this particular suggestion I’m totally OK with that since it is so easy to define document size.
2.) Better handling of verse numbers, especially for hymns that have refrains. In attachment #1 (“Be Joyful Mary”) you can see there is a Latin phrase sung in all 4 verses. I could obviously type it into each verse however I love the implementation of chorus and chorus translation. It is positively brilliant that you allow each verse (or chorus) to have a dedicated translation line right beneath it. I make use of this a few times for latin/english hymns. It is most excellent when the lines are all 1:1. But as you can see in the example, there is no way, even in engrave mode, to shift the verse numbers that I need to be present on every line for some of the longer hymns. It is rather confusing and the numbers would be much better shifted after “Gaude Maria”.
3.) Another hymn specific problem: the numbers are shifted over on the first line due to the time signature, but then they do not line up with the rest of the subsequent lines that lack the time signature. It would be rather cumbersome to shift, via note spacing, every other line of each hymn for a whole hymnal.
4.) There seems to be a related glitch to number 3 in that phrases that start with a long word can result in the verse numbers being pushed beyond the left margin. (Example 2) As you can see, a.) this shouldn’t happen and b.) it looks very sloppy having three different left margins for verse numbers on the same hymn. Perhaps a future version could have a “hard justify” for the verse numbers that shifts everything else right as necessary?
5.) Master pages seem to glitch when implementing multiple lines of tokens. I currently have my template set so that there is the flowTitle and flowSubTitle with things set to center justify (vertically). On hymns where there is no subtitle, Dorico justifies to the TOP of the frame and even will clip the characters of my current font. (Example 3) You can see at the top of the O in the title that there is some frame clipping going on. I would suggest that when there are multiple lines of tokens set to center justify, the token text should center justify in the absence of one of the fields (ie- ignore the second token if left blank or at bare minimum still justify as if text was typed in the second field). I am also concerned that the frame clips text by default. The only fix to this is to add a single “space” character into the subtitle box in the project info, which then causes the title to shift down and center justify as appropriate (second half of example 3.)
6.) As a side note- I would love a way to better edit the info input by tokens. By that I mean, I wish, once generated, we could then click on the text in engrave mode and rich-text format it. Also, there really needs to be a mechanism for entering line breaks in the token fields. And since I’m spouting my wish list, I’d love custom token fields such as {@flowUser1@} {@flowUser2@} etc. (and “Tune Name” for that matter.) I’m currently using multiple tokens incorrectly relative to their programmed labels just so I can have multiple lines. In general I quite love the idea of tokens and I really like the project info pane. That, in and of itself, is tremendously useful to me, to the point that I have created a custom key command for calling up the dialogue.
7.) Mirrored master pages have a funny glitch: since they attempt to automatically mirror each other after you edit text fields, this poses an interesting problem, namely, when you try to have the page numbers in opposite (outside) corners, you cannot justify left and right as appropriate. If you change the right page number to right justify, it causes the left master page number to right justify when you need it to left justify. I have yet to figure out a solution to this apart from center justifying them both and making them small boxes close to the margins. It still doesn’t look as neat as it should.