I’m looking for a course, book, blog, or tutorial that explains the workflow between InDesign / Affinity Publisher when creating a book that mixes text and music notation (scores made in Dorico).
Ideally something that covers topics like:
importing or converting files between the two programs
managing large book layouts
placing music notation (from notation software or PDF/SVG)
handling typography and page styles for long documents
preparing the final files for print or digital publication
If you know any practical resources (courses, blogs, or real workflows) used by publishers or composers, I’d really appreciate it.
Paging @dan_kreider . He might even have courses in ID.
A few notes.
You export from Dorico (PDF, “slices,” or …) and import into ID or AP. Not the reverse. Dorico is not a program for large books. It can do some “book” things, but it does music best.
Both are very capable programs, but they are not “book programs”. They can handle large-volume “books” (i.e., many pages), but they lack many functions needed for advanced books. But, a “book” is in the eye of the beholder. If the book is fairly basic, both will work just fine. Dan has made many excellent hymn books.
These programs are “made for” mounting external “media” such as notation.
Both handle typography and page styles pretty well. I’m hesitant about “long”, though. They might not be suited for huge projects. Could you tell us more about what “long” entails?
I cannot speak for AD, but ID has a large set of controls and checklists for “prepare for print”. (Too many, one might claim.) CTRL+E and “save PDF” are all you normally have to do, except for some PDF settings like bleeds, crop marks, cut marks, etc., if you need them.
I have never seen a full tutorial on it. A book can be so many things, so it is hard to generalise it. I don’t use ID much anymore, so even if I know how to make books, I don’t know how to implement it using ID. Adobe “improve” it so often that I cannot keep up. I use LaTeX. Much better, free, open, and will be around for centuries, unlike any Adobe product.
There are several “modular tutorials” on YouTube for “table of contents” etc., but I don’t think there is a full “A-Z” guide. Certainly not with using Dorico, but Dorico is just a tool for exporting “images”, so any tutorial on mounting “images” will work fine.
ID is absolutely suited to large, complex books. I’ve done a 1200-page book in it and it didn’t break a sweat.
Most of your learning will need to be InDesign itself. Functions like placing and anchoring images, setting paragraph and character styles, using chapters and sections, and parent pages are not specific to music, but are core functionality. ID is complex and daunting, but very powerful.
I am very intrigued by LaTex but haven’t been willing to take the leap. InDesign is perfectly suited to me, aside from the criminal “Adobe tax.”
InDesign pro tip: never, ever use overrides. Make a paragraph style or character style for everything. And take care that you set up your styles in an orderly way.
As an example of what I mean by paragraph styles, here is a partial list of styles from a recent book project I did, a Bach biography I published for a friend of mine.
Each of these styles has its own spacing before and after, intendations, tabs, justification, etc. The list is not quite as clean as I would tell someone else to do it, but it’s organized in folder at least. For something like “Body,” there’s a related cascading style called “Body Tight 1” that reduces the tracking, glyph stretching, and word spacing just slightly to eliminate widows and orphans. And there’s a “Body Tight 2” which is even a little tighter. That sort of thing. Never create overrides.
I’m no GREP master, but what I’ve used it for is nothing short of a revelation. I’m able to do things in seconds with a single key command that would take hours of doing by hand, and something no mere macro could ever handle.
