I paid for an upgrade to Dorico Elements 5 tonight but when I installed it, the programme loads up with Drico SE 5. Have I done something wrong?
If you’ve previously used Dorico SE then you might need to go into the Steinberg Activation Manager and activate your Dorico Elements licence instead of your existing Dorico SE licence.
Richard, thank you I managed to sort it and havenow installed it successfully.
To be honest, I jumped in thinking I was in for a treat of ‘additional engraving options’ for Elements but it appears to be audio improvements only.
There are lots of extra features in Engrave mode in Dorico Elements 5, including access to staff spacing and note spacing tools, and text and music font customisation, but Dorico Elements 5 still excludes the Engraving Options dialog.
Daniel, l am sorry for my last post which was incorrect. I have just been alerted to some if the additional extras in Dorico 5 and l welcome them. I really like the easy manipulation of bar numbers. Thank you Steinberg!
Dorico Elements 5 still excludes the Engraving Options dialog.
Does that mean it’s still not possible to have custom templates?
What I most want is custom headers and footers so I can identify each printed page with a version ID or date, the part name, and “Page x of y”.
The absence of this feature is what convinced me to abandon Dorico and go with MuseScore instead.
If this feature is present Elements 5 I’ll consider upgrading and giving it another try.
Welcome to the forum, @PCarter. You still cannot create your own custom page templates in Dorico Elements, but if you want to tell me what information you want to see in your custom headers and footers, I could make a suitable configuration for you that you could use automatically in all your Dorico projects.
Or any of us pro users : Daniel has already a full plate… 
Just ask, this forum is literally filled with high level musicians so eager to help one another.
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I think you should sit it out and experiment with Dorico Elements. Daniel and the many other users on this forum are very helpful and always willing to jump in and help via this forum. I upgraded to Elements 5 because Elements 4 was so productive for me. With forum help, I have been able to produce over 60 of my old paper clarinet parts on Elements 4. They look superb and I am the envy of all my band colleagues.
[I]f you want to tell me what information you want to see in your custom headers and footers,
In the footer, I want these items at the outer edge:
- Title
- Part name
- Date (or some other version identifier)
- Page x of y
This is the general case. With additional flexibility, in the special case of the first page of a layout, where the title and part name appear at the top of the page, all that’s needed is the date and “Page x of y”. But if that page-specific footer isn’t possible, then the general-case footer is OK even on the first page.
In the header, on the first page, I want
-
- Title
-
- Composer
-
- Lyricist
-
- Part name
On subsequent pages:
- Title
- Page x of y
However, that’s a nice-to-have, not a must, since that same info is also in the footer.
Ideally I would also want some control over the amount of white space at the top and bottom of the page.
Background: I write arrangements for small jazz groups I play in. When I print a stack of parts I want to be able to collate the pages by part. I need to identify each revision of an arrangement, and I’ve settled on the date (i.e. date on which I exported the score to a PDF) as the easiest revision identifier to manage. When performing, each player needs to be sure that they have pulled all pages of their part from their book and ordered them correctly on their music stand. So that’s the rationale for the items I want to see in the footer.
Here’s an example of the footer I’ve settled on. This is at the outer edge of each page.
(I wrote this score in MS 3.6.)
Here’s the best I was able to achieve with Elements 4.
FYI I purchased Elements 4 in June 2022 and invested a lot of time learning it. I wrote about 8 small scores over three months. The second example, above, is from my last project. I liked Dorico and I would go back to using it if I could resolve this and a few other issues that would be off-topic for this thread. But I wouldn’t use it enough to justify buying the Pro version.
I’ll let @MarcLarcher step in and provide you with a page template since he offered – but if anybody has any problems doing this, I’ll be happy to help more directly.
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@PCarter ,
Perhaps to help Marc interpret what you have above (since it left questions in my mind), do you mean for the bullet items to be arranged one above the other as shown or all on one line (as I suspect you do)?
Did you have a preference for a specific character (hypen, comma, etc.) to separate the items?
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Responding to @Derrek, who wrote:
do you mean for the bullet items to be arranged one above the other as shown or all on one line (as I
suspect you do)?
Yes, your suspicion is correct. In my reply to Daniel I embedded two PNG images. (Can you see them? Did I fail to insert them correctly?) The first image is an example of what I want the footer to look like. (I implemented it in MS 3.6.) The four items I specified as bullets appear on one horizontal line, using hyphen(s) as separators. In the first image the text looks like this:
What You Won’t Do For Love (Septeto Arr.) - Tpt - p. 1 of 2 - 5/27/2023
… and this footer is right-justified on the page.
The second image (can you see it?) shows the best I was able to achieve with my copy of Elements 4, like this:
CP50 Arrangement V1 p. 1 of 1
… and this footer is center justified.
[Minor detail: I didn’t mention it in my earlier post, but the Project Title in the second example is “Misty” and the Other Info is “V1 CP 50 Arrangement”. I didn’t use ‘{@projectTitle@}’ in my footer because it appears at the top of the page in the layout header.]
I don’t want to hijack this thread, which originally was about installing Elements 5, so please let me know if we should start up another thread for a focused discussion of headers and footers in Elements 4 and 5.
@dspreadbury (and @MarcLarcher) mentioned the possibility of making a configuration which would implement my preferred formatting in the default page template that’s supported in Elements. Is that something I can do in a Preferences or Options dialog in Elements? I have looked for such a feature many times in the Layout Options dialog and the documentation, but I have not found any support for this.
Thankfully, and hopefully, I look forward to seeing your response(s).
First, Preston, let me apologize for my oversight: you did indeed give a visual example of what you wanted and I missed the small print.
AFAIK Elements does not have the Engrave mode access to change Page Templates, which is what would be required to reconfigure the headers and footers of a Page Template, so access to Dorico Pro would be necessary.
(If you have not already used a trial version of Dorico 5, you could probably download a 30-day trial and play with these functions yourself. You might even like the Pro version enough to start saving up for an upgrade one day. But if Marc is willing, it would likely take him much less time than it would for you to learn how to do it under pressure of time. I would send you something myself, but I do not want to step on Marc’s offer after he has been so generous to give it.)
With a little documentation study I figured how to get what I want, using the following arrangement of text tokens within the Footer text frame:
{@projectTitle@} - {@layoutname@} - {@projectdateymd@} - p. {@page@} of {@pageCount@}
… and then applying the right-justification option in the text-editor panel that appears when one is editing within a Text frame.
So it looks like this:
I’m unable to increase the size of the footer text (Do I need to increase the height of the footer text frame? How?), and I don’t know how to save these formatting options into the Default template for use in my next project.
But this is definitely an improvement.
Usually, you increase the size of your Paragraph style in the paragraph style editor. I suppose it’s not available in Elements.
Could you tell me which fonts you use, in order to provide you with a file you could use as the starting point for your projects?
The best way would be to send me a project of yours that really satisfies you (from the point of view of the settings you might have made), with no flows. I will use the library manager to copy those settings on your template and try and build you the footers you need 
Paragraph styles, font styles, and character styles editing is indeed now available in Dorico Elements 5.
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Elements 5 is a massive upgrade!