Can I do this simple thing with Dorico? Writing books

I must confess that I have not used Dorico much, so my question might be naive.
I am writing a book on harmony. It’s mostly text and I am doing it in Word. I often need to cite short musical examples. Maybe two or four bars as illustrations.
Is Dorico the best tool for this Job? What is the best way to do this. I could just simply use MS Snipping tool to cut a bit from a Dorico screen, but this seems messy and inelegent,. What is the best way?

Thank you all
Z

That will give you screen-resolution bitmapped images, which when printed, will look rough.

Dorico is ideal for preparing musical illustrations for a text book. Create each illustration as a Flow in one document; and use Dorico’s “Slices” feature, to save rectangular areas as images.

I would export the images as PDFs, which will be vector graphics. These can be resized without any loss of quality.

That’s possible; though there’s a reason that DTP software exists. :grimacing:

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@benwiggy, did you mean SVGs?

What I am trying to understand is, is Dorico capable of producing only 4 bars with space around it, to the “paper” size dictated? Or perhaps there is some method of “quoting” fragments of music

No, I meant PDFs.

I’ve already detailed Dorico’s ability to do this.

Graphic slices link If you have problems with this, ask back here. It would be more messy trying to do what you want to do in Dorico itself. Just create a folder for all your Dorico slices and you can import them into Word (or better, a DTP program) as you need to.

If it is a book and professionally published, the publisher should give you information about the formatting etc., what software would be best to use, or file format and various settings like margins etc. for binding, or they may simply adapt what they get from you to their software so they can prepare it according to their preferences and output, printing requirements. In this case you could give them the slices folder as well so they can place as required if they need to.

SVG means Scalable Vector Graphics
so that’s definitely the perfect format for this kind of job.
PDFs can carry pictures in a lot of different formats, Bitmaps, jpegs, but also SVGs. So PDF is a choice, if you can be sure it carries a (scalable) vector graphic. Which is the case if you export slices as pdf from within Dorico…

PDFs exported from Dorico are vector graphics. They are also a bit more reliable than SVG, particularly when it comes to fonts.

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Yes, sorry Ben, I was still typing, when you prepared your answer. You are right of course, but it seemed the fonts would be handled by his MS Word application.
Have you experienced any hiccups with fonts like dynamics or time signatures, when exporting musical slices as SVG? I think also those fonts are drawn as vectors - so should be 100% safe…

I would recommend using PDF over SVG. SVGs exported from Dorico do not embed fonts, whereas PDFs do. (SVGs don’t really embed fonts in the same way as PDFs, so instead you would express font characters as outlines, but Dorico doesn’t do this.)

If you know your SVG will only be used on a computer where all the necessary fonts are installed, then the SVG will work OK – but for safety, and particularly for preparing material for publication, I would err on the side of either using SVGs with no font references (where you have manually post-processed the PDF to convert all font characters to curves) or simply using PDFs exported directly from Dorico.

Since you can use the PDFs directly exported from Dorico with no post-processing, that is what I would recommend.

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Thank you all. Got it!