Over the last couple years our church put together a hymnal (Pro Rege – For the King) that I worked on in Dorico and Affinity Publisher (I stayed in version 2, though I’ve since migrated to V3 without new issues). We ended up with about 450 songs (including a representative for each Psalm) and a section of creeds, a catechism, and a confession.
Working in Dorico for the songs was terrific, and I can’t imagine how much longer it would have taken in other software to get the same results! I’m particularly thankful for the library manager, page templates, and the design philosophy that settings rather than manual adjustments are the way to go. I’m also greatly appreciative of the work of Dan Kreider (and many others on this forum), from whom I have learned a great deal.
Affinity comes up every so often in other topics. This was my first project in the software, and I found it to be more than adequate (with some quirks). The biggest issue was related to font ligatures when I had to edit the distance between a system and the attribution info (e.g., when a hymn takes a half page instead of the whole page). In some cases, Affinity would replace the ligature with different characters (e.g., DŽ instead of fi) and extreme character spacing (-600%!) upon editing the PDF, and I had to make sure to edit the text in Affinity to correct this. Thankfully this occurred on only a small number of pages.
Also worth noting: the Affinity project file ended up around 700 MB, but Affinity itself would use as much as 50GB of additional hard drive space while the project was open. I’m on an M4 Mac Mini with 16 GB of RAM. The only slow-down was on the first occasion of saving the project file after opening it. That would take 30-60 seconds, and then subsequent saves would be near-instant.
I’d be very interested in having a forum on this combination of software. I too have been working on a hymnal in Dorico and Affinity. Perhaps in Facebook? Although I am nearly complete with 4 different formats for the hymnal, there are still a lot of things that I think I could do better, I just don’t know how. And I suspect I’ve figured out a trick or two that could be helpful to someone else.
This thread is probably as good as any place. Or if the questions are too-affinity focused, then perhaps their forum.
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I’m amazed how many people undertake hymnal projects. I would like to produce one for our cathedral too, but I don’t have the time. It’s all the time I’ve got just to get all the worship aids ready every week.
Happy to answer questions. I’ve done many, many hymnals using Dorico and InDesign (pretty much the same idea). I tried Affinity a few years ago, but at that time it wasn’t able to handle large documents without memory leaks and crashes. I’m nearly finished with the biggest hymnal we’ve done to date: 1150 pages. Here’s a sample page.
There are about 300 psalm settings and about 400 hymns in this one.
Edit: 700 MB seems like a lot. The InDesign file for this big hymnal is only 130 MB. But it sounds like Affinity solved its memory leak issue, which is encouraging. I just think I’m in too deep with InDesign to switch now.
Edit 2: I know the double chant tone is incredibly squished. I’m told it’s standard practice, but yikes…
@James_DeCaro That is absolutely gorgeous, James. You just can’t beat Dorico for high-quality output. I occasionally do stuff in Dorico for the small church choir I sing in, and it never ceases to amaze me how much better the quality of Dorico’s printed output is compared to some of the professionally published stuff we often see.
A naive question out of curiosity: for what are you using Affinity/InDesing or any graphic software with Dorico. The result Dorico produces needs further tailoring?
Creating a book sometimes needs layout and font-tweaking functions that are much easier to control in a publishing program like Affinity Publisher or In Design than in Dorico, which is optimized for music notation rather than text.
It is not that one cannot create a book-like publication in Dorico, but it is often much easier in the long run to use different programs for different steps in the process of creating a book with music, particularly a large book like a hymnal or textbook.
The single biggest reason it doesn’t work to do it in Dorico is that all those thousands of tiny manual positioning changes can be easily lost when things move around. The document would have to be strictly created and compiled in order, and the order would have to be unchanged.
There are other practical reasons as well, but this is the one that ultimately makes it impossible.
I assume it doesn’t effect lyrics and any music related items like tempo marks and dynamics , is this right?
I’ve made some hymnal books in the last few years for my community, so not professional requirements at all, and I was able to manage it without any external app. This why I’m curious…
The biggest was about 120 pages. Had to make many manual adjustments as they were extra verses ans some songs without accompaniment, so it is quite messy, but saved load of space by making sometimes 2 colomns, etc. and people quite like it.
As I am very unexperienced in other apps, it was obvious that, I don’t use anything but Dorico, and it worked ver, well. Needed to make many manuál adjustment, but after a while I got the routine and enjoyed even that.
But I think the main thing is that, I don’t work for a professional company so requirements are set only by myself and even if I try to do my best and watching loads of professional editions, I am free to do everything as I want…
One area of Affinity/InDesign that is extremely helpful is a set of robust tools for dealing with text styles and find/replace with regular expressions. For instance, we wanted to format the catechism questions, answers, and Bible references in a particular way, and Affinity allowed me to do 98% of that work very quickly (and then the occasional manual adjustment to tweak something my original regex had missed). Combining that powerful search and applying text styles meant that subsequent changes would be automatically applied to all relevant portions of the text.
I also found it more efficient to have a separate Dorico file for each hymn. While I wanted nearly all settings the same across every file, there are occasional cases where I’d want to edit something like the gap between staves. If all the hymns were in one Dorico file, I’d have to handle those adjustments manually instead of just altering the setting in Dorico’s options.
Here’s a sample page.
