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.
My concern about this thread, or this forum in general, is that there’s no threading of conversations. Perhaps the existing Dorico facebook will do, though I don’t know how obnoxious people will find it if I’m asking Affinity questions on that group. Might create the group myself and see where it goes.
Sometimes I want to do more complex layouts which are simply easier to accomplish outside of Dorico. If I want to overlay extra graphics (such as images of manuscripts) or use any fancy typographical features such as drop caps, etc. it’s just simpler to have Dorico do the music part, and affinity do the rest. Faster anyway. There are still a few engraving things that Dorico can’t do how I want, so I need to manipulate the vectors in affinity for those. A carpenter uses saws and chisels. I consider using both tools part of the same workflow for professional engraving. It’s not a nock on Dorico. I just know what I need and use the tools I have at my disposal to accomplish things the quickest and easiest way possible.
To make Doric ‘closer’ to a DTP program would require a huge amount of time and effort from the Team which would reduce the notation developement. I would suggest: put all efforts into notation and scripting (and if time permits, some enhancements of the “book” aspects), but there are better and more efficient tools outside Dorico to make books and the “merger” of the two (or three) programs is not too difficult.
There is one case of making a book that, for me, is a toss-up between going all-in for Dorico vs using Affinity to finish the project. When I make materials for an ensemble of students on transposing instruments (ie, my school band), I have typically stayed in Dorico so that changes I make affect all of the part books at once. The alternative (which might be faster, depending on the number of edits), would be to link PDF exports from Dorico to the Affinity file so that the edits I make in Dorico update live in Affinity.
@Romanos I like the tool analogy! And I appreciate having great tools.
I’ve done this in a few projects. Notably, an opera score where only half the arias survive. I laid out the libretto in Affinity, and then had the arias as PDF from Dorico which could be updated, if I caught any errors or wanted to change the exact system breaks.
This meant that where an aria finished at the top on one page, I could have the libretto continuing on the same page.
Here’s a sample page.
