Is there a Dorico 7 coming? If so I would ask to have your edits display when editing Page Templates. Now you can’t see what you did until you L&R, apply and close and then the opportunity to see it only to find out you don’t like it it or it needs some tweaking. Sometimes a lot of tweaking.
Perhaps a view button could be added?
Good idea. In general, though, I think Page Templates need to more consistent with common publishing software or even word processing software. Everything one sees should be WYSIWYG. This love affair with frames other than the actual music frames is just a complicated layer that isn’t really necessary IMO. This should then further extend to the Engrave mode where we should have the ability to use the pointing devices to move around anything and everything as we wish rather than having so many constraints on what can move where and when.
This would be a game changer…in a positive way as best I can tell. Sibelius doesn’t have that capability, Finale didn’t but I’m not sure about MuseScore. It would probably require a significant change in the underlying tech but it sure would be nice…
Besides doing everything blindly, it can be tricky to select the frame you want if you have several or many.
If I can ask for one more, make it possible to have different page margins on different pages.
How would you put text and images on the page? All DTP programs use frames to hold them.
I understand what you say. My understanding is that most software does not require one to manipulate frames with the exception of graphics or embedded documents from another source in order to edit a page. Perhaps the page is being used as one large frame but it’s invisible to the user. I haven’t used DTP in several years since retiring but I do not recall having to select a frame before I edited what was inside of it - I just clicked where I wanted to edit and went about the editing.
In my experience, that’s not true. Publisher (R.I.P.), Quark, InDesign, and Affinity all require you to add explicit text or graphics frames before adding text or images. Then you can resize the frames, or reposition them, or rotate them, among other things.
I don’t recall what I used - it’s been a minute. I’m not going to argue about it. I just know that I didn’t ever see a bunch of distracting green (or any color) frames on the page when editing.
And, of course, the ability to create use Object Styles on a frame makes the whole process so much easier. I’d love it if object styles came to Dorico.
I have a couple of user macros to apply “styles” I often use to frames.
Unless I was doing a lot of work adjusting frames in Dorico, I doubt I’d go to the trouble of making a bunch of macros. With InDesign, it’s just a comprehensive dialog box with all the options for placing, sizing, coloring, bordering, and setting a default paragraph style. It takes me only a few seconds to create one, and I have several in the book typesetting I do.
What sorts have you made?
Happy cake day, @clancyweeks
For example, I was working on a score that had periodic blocks of narration that I was using text frames for. So I have a macro that formats a text frame with a white background, top alignment, and a certain padding value.
If you wanted to make extensive use of this method, you could record a macro in which you set a whole bunch of the available properties on a frame, doesn’t matter which values, just to get the lines into the macro. Then when you want to craft a particular “style”, you can duplicate the macro file and edit it to remove the lines you don’t need and change the remaining values to the ones you want. I would think that’s about the same effort as setting options on an actual style.
Wow… I’d completely let that slip by me. Didn’t think it had been that long.
It would definitely be a lot easier than making a new macro for each. And I should have thought of that…
Man, I’m getting old.
Layers?
I suspect frames are here to stay. I have to agree they need a significant upgrading and improvement. We have the baby step now let’s have the mature ‘frames’. They are simply too tricky to use and yet again why some folks shun Dorico as to complicated an frustrating.
Who designs and thinks it’s a good idea to make a page editor where you can’t see what you’ve done until you click out of it?
Personally I love Page Templates. But they need fixing.
I think you’d still need frames in the layers. (And layers add yet another level of complexity.)
A layer fills the whole available space; a frame constrains the space available to text and images. Without a text frame, how would you indicate where the text should start, and how it should wrap? How would you move it to another location?
You are probably right if you need heavy duty text and/or graphics work a 3rd party app is probably best. However, most music scores don’t need that level of ability. The very same logic was bantered around in the Finale days. Just use a 3rd party app to do that.
Well look where that attitude got Finale!
I think there’s a couple of different things here. In Dorico, you can make all the page edits you want, and see the results right away – but many of those edits create page overrides, which users try to avoid.
The issue here is visualizing changes made to page templates. And FWIW, in DTP apps like InDesign and Affinity, I think the system works the same as it does in Dorico – when you edit a master page, you can only see the master page, and you need to close that editor to see the effects on the specific pages.
I think there’s room for improvement in page templates, but personally I’m not bothered by the fact that I have to close the template editor to see the effects of my changes.
