I am producing parts for a 4 movement piece for Saxophone Orchestra and was wondering about the best practise for creating good layouts.
At present, each movement is a separate flow and I am simply allowing Dorico to have one frame (MA) which flows across each page as required. As each new flow is reached, Dorico automatically puts the Flow Heading on the page and carries on filling the frames. I have been formatting the layout by using a mixture of staff size, System Breaks and Frame Breaks which is giving me a reasonable result - although the flow headings occasionally cause headaches by seeming to randomly move around the page, forcing frame breaks seems to solve it though.
My questions:
Is it best practise to do largely what I’ve been doing or should I create a frame for each flow? and
How do I modify (or turn off entirely) the flow headings that are automatically added in the frame?
There is a Layout Option to start Flows on a new page, or not.
You should not normally need to create frames, except in the design of your page template.
Again, there is a Layout Option to hide/remove Flow Headings. You can edit them in Engrave mode (bottom right panel), and you can Change the Flow Heading for a given page. (Right click on the Page icon in Engrave mode.)
IIRC, Flow Headings don’t move automatically in response to some kinds of manual edits; so if you’ve made lots of manual adjustments on the page, you might find that the Flow Heading is in the wrong place, because it’s sitting where the music ought to be.
Thank you benwiggy. I was thinking specifically of where one flow is quite short (or has a lot of multi rests) and realistically only takes up half a page. If I do a lot of manual jiggery pokery then the heading for the next flow can be wrongly placed (exactly as you suggest) and I was wondering if creating a new frame would ease the problem.
I’m getting the piece done and it looks OK to me, I was just wondering what others did.
Thanks again
Peter
If you have one short flow that you want to follow on; and the rest you want to start on a new page, then set the Layout Option to follow on, and just add a Frame Break at the start of the others.
You can increase the margins around the Flow Heading to fit; again in Layout Options.
Avoid manual jiggery pokery as much as possible!
Or as Kenneth Williams said: “I don’t mind the jiggery. It’s the pokery I’m not so keen on.”
Indeed, Flow Headings are a type of text frame that will move with the music. But as soon as you start any manual jiggery-pokery with frames on a certain page, you create an override, after which no frame on that page will ever move by itself again and you will find Flow Headings (or lack thereof) in very odd places.
Can you do that if you have Flows set to start a new page?
I misremembered. I thought Wait for next break would trump that, but it does not.
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