Best practice for flexible instrumentation layouts (players and staff labels)

Hi all, I’m preparing some score and parts for a flexible instrumentation setting.
However, I’m having some layout problems especially with part player headers and score staff labels.

Looking at Hal Leonard scores, they have these as condensed staff labels:
immagine

Here, the Flute and Oboe parts are separate, but they still show up on the same staff in the score. No problem, condensing is made for this, but I cannot set the label as “Flute/Oboe”, the default is “Flute + Oboe” which occupies more space and I don’t really like it. This is a problem with longer instrument names, like “Violoncello + Trombone + Bassoon”, which reduces the width of the music page and it looks quite ugly.

immagine
Hal Leonard organizes them neatly on two lines, but I’m having trouble doing this.

On the cello/trombone topic. Here I use two players, one for the Cello and one for the other instruments, so I can put bowing indications only on the cello part, and then condense them in the score.


You can already see the issue.

Furthermore, the workflow for Layout names is quite convoluted, because I’d like for the parts to look like this (in this case, both trumpet and clarinet read from the same part):
immagine

I can modify the layout name, but putting it on two lines is not a straightforward task, involving writing on another software and copying it in the layout name box in Dorico. Also, this change isn’t reflected automatically in the Staff labels, so I have to also manually change the name there.

And I’m still wrapping my head around percussion kits, their labels and layout names…

How would you setup your score if you had to do something like this?

The most recent Discover Dorico session covered quite a lot of what you’re after. However, that method assumes that all the parts’ content is exactly identical, which is not the case with the bowing indications and occasional octave displacements.

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I wonder whether you might want to modify your part layouts to use two tokens instead of one for your layout names; you could use e.g. {@layoutName@} and {@playerName@}, already entered as two separate paragraphs in the master page template.

Hm yes, that could work for some of those things. I just realized how the names are actually linked haha

So, I could name the layout “Parte 1” and the player “Flute” and put them in the Master Page one under the other. The only problem is that, when switching layouts, I’ll see a bunch of “Parte 1, 2, 3” that don’t really tell me which part it is, but I could work with that.