Best practice for cleanest operation across two machines

Dorico
1

All,

My Dorico setup has become something of a mess. I use two Macs, both running Dorico 6. My key commands are mostly the same, but every so often I make a change on one system and forget whether I made the change on the other. Thus, each keycommands.json file has slightly different content. I plan to try using freefilesync to prevent this in the future but have not set it up yet.

Beyond this, my few template files are also a mess and not the same on both systems. Some of them have my most recent adjustments to appearance, like using “m” in place of “mf”, and some adjustments to the scale of specific music symbols, etc. Some of them do not have the most recent fonts. Sometimes it seems that elements of page layout (system and frame breaks) will transfer from the template file to a new project, but I don’t know how to avoid this or where it’s coming from.

Each of my templates and projects has a slew of unused paragraph styles that I think are no longer in use — though it’s possible I used them somewhere and can’t remember. I think I can clear some of that out of the doricolib file, but I also seem to get all of that noise back when I import all of my customizations via the Library Manager, which I seem to have to do every time I make small adjustments to the overall look of things and want to transfer that to existing projects (usually things that are in process but already somewhat complete).

What I really want is: a set of clean custom templates with no added junk in the projects; both computers synced on a regular basis so that all of my settings and templates stay the same, and continue to stay the same if I make adjustments. My question: is there any really good way to approach this? Should I (or do I have to) start from scratch, deleting existing templates, and make new ones from the ground up? Is there any way to take an existing project that has all the customization I need, clear out all the project-specific data like frame breaks, and replace my current templates with that without reintroducing a lot of unused fonts, etc.?

I know it isn’t the end of the world if I have to continue as is, but when something goes wrong there are so many settings and paragraph styles and random things left over from various imports that I have no idea what to fix or what is causing a problem. Thanks!

2

Much of your question is about managing options in your templates and projects, and I don’t have a great answer to that.

Yes – File > Save as Project Template, and then make sure that “Preserve existing flows” is unticked.

In terms of managing templates and settings on two computers, I make use of file system tricks to keep things in sync. Basically, I took my whole Dorico user config folder on one computer and moved it to my Dropbox folder, and then I created a junction (on Windows; I think it’s a symlink on Mac) from the moved folder to the place where the folder used to be.

On the second computer, after Dropbox synced the folder, I deleted the user config folder and replaced it with a junction.

There are two things to be careful of with this method. First, preferences.xml contains some hardcoded file paths, so this method will only work if your two computers are set up the same way in terms of file locations. (For example, I use the same username on both computers, so that my Documents folder has the same path on both.) And second, on Windows I have found that installing Dorico updates deletes the junction; I need to remember to put it back after an update. (The actual config files under Dropbox aren’t disturbed.)

3

I have also read that using this method (with Mac at least) can be an issue if Dorico is open on two computers at once. Do you not have this problem? And thanks!

4

I’m never working on both computers at once, but I can understand why that might cause problems.