Best way to create a template/House style?

Dorico
#1

As long as templates and house styles aren’t part of Dorico yet, what would be the best way to create them to avoid having to remake the layout for a specific publisher over and over again?

At the moment I am doing engraving work for a publisher in California and in Holland who both are considering to move from Sibelius to Dorico for their music publishing workflow… Plus I do a lot of engraving work for an orchestra in Florida, a composer in Italy, a song writer in Saint Paul, Minnesota and when I have time… for myself :wink:

So to avoid redoing all their different house styles, what would be the best workflow?

#2

At the moment probably to set it all up in an empty document, save it and use it as a template. (Or use an existing project, delete all the music/flows and save it as a template.) Start new projects in the template and do save as.

1 Like
#3

So the master pages as made in a project will stay intact when I delete all Players and Flows?

#4

Yes, they’re independent from the musical content, like all the options.

#5

I spent today creating 4 different templates for one publisher’s house style, looks great and so much easier and feels more stable than in Sib.

Now, because they use front matter (Title page, info page, TOC) and back matter (last page has their logo), it would be nice if I could add this to the templates as well, but I am a little worried that this could give problems later on. In the last project I did this, I wasn’t able to delete the title page anymore because the music pages started to move around every time I tried. Instead, to avoid messing up the project, I exported everything to PDF and deleted the title page from there.

Any suggestions? Is it save to add front and back matter to a template?

#6

I would suggest making additional master pages that contain the front and back matter, and then manually inserting them once the rest of the project’s layout is done.

#7

Still, if you want to use the same basic front page in different projects, you cannot save and load them, if I understand it right.
This means you have to make them repeatedly again, or knowing beforehand which project to use as template and delete the existing music.

#8

You can make them as master pages, and then use a Master Page Change to actually use them in your layout.

#9

Yes, but all within the same project. You cannot use a saved master page in another project, is it?

#10

No, that is correct, but André was asking about template projects that he has set up, one for each of his four main clients, and adding custom master pages for front and back matter to those template projects is a good approach.

#11

Right, got it. I guess it’s not that easy to implement saving and loading master pages to disc, to add them to other projects.

#12

No, but you could turn the issue on its head: set up your master pages as a template, then import in flows from other projects as you wish.

#13

I tried to create master pages for the front and back matter and also played with the idea of creating a flow specially for the front matter alone, but could not get it to work. It keeps on pushing the music frames out of place. So I created the front matter manually for now by inserting the extra pages and creating the text frames in layout mode. I will experiment though with your idea, Daniel. Thanks.

#14

I’ll try pianoleo’s suggestion. Re-creating the same Masterpages or import all flows from the project to the “template”. It depends on the number of flows (and projects) which method is quicker. Thanks.

#15

Here is an example of a template set up for a publisher, including all paragraph styles, engraving options and special fonts, as well as Master Pages for First, Default, Title and Acknowledgements, Table of Contents, and Other Matter. The page templates use Title, Subtitle, Dedication, Composer, Lyricist, Copyright, Work Number and Other Info from Project Info for pages for both project and individual flows.

The template was based on a particular project and included multiple players, instruments and layouts. Hading set up all the info I then deleted the flows that I used to set up the info. Everything seems to remain and I have used this template to create new projects.

Here is the zip file of the template:
2018-07-29 20-20-15_LiturgicalSong Template.dorico.zip (751 KB)

#16

Thanks a lot, Paul. I will have a look now. I did it like this before but didn’t know where to go with an empty template. The players are already inside, but Dorico asks still for players to be made. What I didn’t realize is that I first need to create the Layouts manually.

#17

I see now where I went wrong when i tried to use mater-pages for front and back-matter. I created the title pages first, then selected one and choose Insert Master-page change from the menu. That messed things up. Correct way is to create one page at a time and choose the master-page from the window.

btw, I like your use of the page count token, I never saw this before. It would be great to have a layout count token as well that could increase any given starting number.

#18

Dorico is very flexible with its use of Project info. The template uses Page Count token at the bottom of every page in the overall project and the FlowPage token at the top of the page, in conjunction with Flow Title, for the follow-on pages for individual flows. It also uses Work Number to indicate the item number in the project. The template is for a compilation of works.

#19

For front matter that is entirely text, I still create these in InDesign or other DTP app, and then combine PDFs of the finished document.

#20

I noticed that when I import a flow from another project into the template project, the original flow’s layout has been changed. See screenshots:

original flow:

Screen Shot 2018-07-29 at 15.54.29.png
Screen Shot 2018-07-29 at 15.54.29.png815×407 56.7 KB

Flow after importing into template project:
Screen Shot 2018-07-29 at 15.56.29.png
Screen Shot 2018-07-29 at 15.56.29.png786×523 61.9 KB