Hi Everyone,
Can anyone please provide tips on how one would go about engraving a score to look like this?
I’m coming to Dorcio from Sibelius, and very new to the engraving aspect. I’d love to be able to make something as beautiful as this.
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What’s stopping you? All the techniques you need are in the manual, and there are many tutorial videos from Steinberg and others. Are there specific reasons you think you can’t do this? Say and then people can help.
And beauty in art takes practice. And more practice. You’ll get good at design like this, but you have to put in the learning. As it was said in Ancient Greece, ‘there is no royal road to Geometry’.
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Welcome to the forum.
This exact score was made by the wonderful @Romanos who works with Dorico and is active on this forum. If you have specific questions, I’m sure he or any other forum member can answer them.
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Everything can be done dorico standard except the indent at the top. I had to do that by hand in affinity publisher. (To do that, I had an empty beat one with a hidden rest, and then I just select the clef and key signature, move them over by hand, and then select the staff lines and drag them over too.)
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Oh— and the dotted lines to help guide the eye across large gaps in the verses, those are done in affinity too. You CAN do them directly in dorico, but I find it a lot faster in AP. Dorico is a little touchy when it comes to stacking lines, and slight changes can cause them to jump. AP just places them according to XY coordinates so it’s just simpler.
The little angled bracket is also something I add by hand, although you could add a similar line as a custom vector shape and add it in Dorico if desired. But I bring every score I work on out into AP to do these little tweaks.
QR codes and logos can be added via the graphics frames and SVG images, or placed by hand in AP after the fact.
There is a lot that I obsess over, however, that isn’t formula reproducible. Spacing, font choices, subtle centering of all the text once the vertical stave spacing is finalized, etc. etc. But Dorico gets me 90% of the way there before I go to the polishing phase.
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Yes, it’s worth pointing out that the Affinity tools including Affinity Publisher help very much with production of the final product on conjunction with Dorico output, and you don’t have to suffer the intolerable exploitative subscription model Adobe subjects one to. [Thank goodness Dorico is not like that.]
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I take 99.7% of all my scores into affinity to do additional graphical tweaks. (Although this is less a reflection of Dorico and more of my OCD. lol)
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You might want to share with everyone what you “bring” and “take” into Affinity. A file exported – ‘printed’ – from Dorico as PDF or SVG? I would like to guess SVG. 
I’m interested, do you import the scores to affinity as PDF’s? And do you have a workflow where you could replace some pages with newer versions from Dorico? Or is it strictly first dorico, then affinity?
I use both PDFs and SVGs. What about you, James @Romanos? 
PDFs are more reliable, particularly where fonts are concerned. Though you can ‘outline’ font data in both formats to become just graphic lines.
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I export raw pdf’s from Dorico (via dorico’s native export feature) and open those with affinity. Generally, these days, everything appears in affinity perfectly. Every once in a while there is a little font issue or something, but these days I know what to expect and can anticipate any issues.
When you open a pdf in affinity, literally every single object is editable and movable down to the pixel level. That’s why you can sometimes do fancy things like the indented melody of the refrain.
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Occasionally, I will export a revision of an individual page from dorico and bring that in to an existing affinity document, then copy any special edits I did in AP to the new page, and finally delete the old page. That’s a bit cumbersome, but many of my arrangements are psalms or shorter choral works, so sometimes it’s just as fast to redo the whole pdf and just copy the special tweaks from the old AP version to the new one.
(Things like having a logo exceed the normal dorico margins, for instance, or having hyperlinks be active, clickable links in the pdf.)
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@Daniel_Marshall Just to help you get started if you are a beginner with Dorico, here are some links which relate to what was done.
No time signature
Voices
Barlines, input
Barline tick
No stems
Dotted slurs
You would be advised to start with learning Dorico first if you are not already familiar enough with the basics,
and watching various YouTube videos so you have an idea of how it works as it is quite different from Sibelius as you would probably already know
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how did you fill in the lyrics in dorico to get that long lines?
I don’t exactly know how he did it, but you could try this
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Just a humble attempt … indeed is quite challenging since I am more familiar with Sibelius and Finale …
Generally one uses PDF’s. [That’s kind of an unspoken assumption.] And yes @Romanos does that as he mentions. The point being, Affinity is great at PDF work.
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