Then I exit Dorico completely. I restart it, create a totally new project, and immediately open the Paragraph Styles dialog. The style for Title is this:
OOPS! I’m not allowed to include a second screen shot. Maybe I can add one in the comments. This screen shot would show the same items except that the Font entry is disabled and says Adobe Caslon Pro (inherited from Default Text).
The font is disabled and incorrect. This style is still marked as a default style.
This looks like a bug to me, but being a newbie, I thought I would ask first.
I suspect the above bug might be related to the fact that I chose Adobe Caslon Pro as my default text font family under Edit / Preferences / General. I would expect this to override factory settings, but not my own font family overrides.
As long as I’m mentioning bugs, whoever designed the font selection tools created the most awkward selection mechanism I’ve ever seen in a professional product. But the selection mechanism in the Paragraph Styles dialog is leagues ahead of the one in the Preferences Dialog—that one fills my screen with dialog names, from “20th Century Font” to “Minion Pro SmBd”. Yes, that’s right, every font after Minion Pro is off screen and unselectable.
Most professional programs do two things that Dorico fails to do:
Allow the user to type in a font name (not just use a character as a way to move to the first font starting with that letter).
If you display a menu, start with from the current font, not the first font (if I select Futura Bk and then want to try Future Hv, I don’t want to have to type “F” and then scroll back to where I was).
Most pro programs also provide a font sample. Right now, though, I’d be happy to just be able to have a default Title paragraph style that uses Americo BT.
I removed the star and hit OK. Then I brought up the dialog and turned on the star and hit OK again. Finally, I started a new project, brought up the paragraph styles dialog and checked—it now has the correct value.
So then I went back to the original project where I had noticed the problem. The setting is unchanged (i.e. it is wrong). I even tried completely restarting Dorico—it’s still wrong.
Well, it’s some progress as it appears that new projects will get the default, but I had understood that setting a style to default affects all projects—new and existing.
I was going to mark you answer as the solution, but it’s only part of the solution. But thanks!
Setting defaults does not affect existing projects, and I for one am extremely glad: if I’m implementing some default for one client and another client with different defaults asks for a revision to some project I worked on months or years ago, I don’t want their original file to be silently dirtied by my other client’s defaults.
Hmm…when I searched for answers to my question, I saw some people referring to this feature (the change affecting existing projects) as a substitute for the inability to import paragraph styles. Maybe they were talking about older versions?
I just looked at the Library Manager again. I thought the Paragraph Styles weren’t there, but there they are. I agree that this is a much better way of doing things. Essentially, I want to create one or more House Styles and apply them as needed. It looks like the Library Manager does this.
Yes, the Library Manager was only introduced in v4.0, along with the ability to save your own templates.
Depending on whether you’re starting a project from scratch or updating house style in an existing one, one or the other (or possibly both) of these features should fit the bill.
