I’m getting pretty proficient at turning out finished works in Dorico – as long as I stick to using Master pages! But when I want to over-ride a layout master and customize a particular page, I’m not having much luck.
Case in point: I need to have each Flow starting a new page – however, there are a FEW instances where I’d like start a new Flow in the middle of a page.
OK: I can push up the original Music Frame, and add a second Music Frame (LA), and I get the next Flow. But then I also get the same Flow starting again on the next page!
I guess the answer is then to Filter out that entire flow in the Master. But that seems like asking for trouble, and in a large work, I could easily either miss out a Flow altogether, or duplicate it, if I’m not on the ball. I’m also a bit worried about doing loads of page over-rides and then changing the music at beginning so that my over-rides are all ‘off’ by a page…
Can anyone shed some light and offer some useful tips?
The answer is the “frame chain” information which controls how the music flows between frames.
When you create a new music frame, on a page it starts a new local frame chain, which displays the music again from the start of the flow. (Well, actually you can select exactly which flow and which players it displays, but that is irrelevant for your question)
At the top left of the frame there is a “paper clip” icon. Next to that, the original frame will say “MA 1” for the first frame on the page in the “Master” frame chain MA. Your new frame will say “LA 1” for the first frame in a “Local” frame chain LA. (You can have more than one master or local chain, called MA, MB, etc).
Click on the paper clip for your new frame, change the frame chain to MA, and click somewhere else to close the selection panel. Your frame should then be MA 2 and the music should flow the way you want.
You might want to try a different approach to the whole problem - in Setup Mode, change the Layout options to allow multiple flows on one page, and then add frame breaks where you don’t want that to happen.
The longer-term intention is that the kinds of layouts you would want to produce for parts should be achievable more or less automatically, without requiring you to do any kind of overrides in Engrave mode. The downside with the current system, as you’ve found, is that the overrides are specific to the particular page index in the layout. This is not an unsurmountable problem, as you can make a multiple selection of pages in the Pages panel on the right-hand side and move them all together, which allows you to shuffle overrides forwards and backwards through the layout, but obviously where possible you want to avoid that.
Once we have automatic features to insert titles etc. for flows, the existing feature to allow flows to start on the same page as the end of the previous flow will become a lot more useful, and a lot of the situations in which you currently have to resort to using page overrides will be eliminated.
No, MA 2 gives me a blank Frame. LA 1 gives me the next Flow on the same page, but then I have to get rid of that Flow in the Master Filter (and keep over-riding with LA on subsequent pages of the Flow).
Hmm. I’ve got over 70 flows, and most of them need to conform to the “First” Master page…!
I’m doing an opera: Acts, Scenes, recits, arias, all in different flows. Sometimes there’s a little bit of recit after an aria, before the next Scene. etc.
