On large film/tv projects we will often have to go through and export full scores and instrumental part pdfs for multiple dorico files (30/40+) to send to the copyists for printing. It would be really time-saving to have a feature/standalone application that could allow you to select multiple dorico files and export as pdf all their contained parts (full scores and instrumental parts).
I understand that this could cause a logic issue if for example the instrumentation is different from score to score, but for ones like ours where the lineup is identical between all dorico scores (given they all stem from the same template), this would save a lot of time having to open and close every single file in order to set the exact same settings and hit export pdf.
It might be nice if the Dorico executable had some command-line options for printing or other export, so you could batch process such things on the CLI.
Just curious, @DG1 : I assume that these multiple files are cues for the same film/tv show. Wouldn’t it work in your case to make them all flows in the same Dorico project file?
(The solution to a lot of these sort of requests would really be a more robust scripting environment. Scripting combinations/varieties of PDF export is so easy in, say, InDesign.
Dorico developers risk drowning under the barrage of trivial feature requests that could really be dispatched with a simple script, if only that were possible!)
Yes you’re right, or the same production music album. We considered this, but opted against it for two main reasons:
1 - We have a team of people that orchestrate for us doing maybe 5-10 cues each. They obviously can’t all access the file at the same time, so would need to do it in separate file(s) and we import them manually into one mega-file. At this point you’re creating an extra file, when it would be easier just to export all the pdfs with the feature described above.
2 - If you have all the music in a single file, you then have a single point of failure, so if the mega-file gets corrupted or becomes unbearably slow then you would need to start importing them all again from scratch or throw in the towel and do it the old way!
Truth be told, we’ve never actually tried it because we feel these two reasons were enough not to, so you may well right and that’s a better way of doing lots of PDFs with the way things stand now. I think the ideal though would be this feature that @dspreadbury has said they are working on!
This would be an incredible useul feature for those of us dealing with hundreds of files.
If you do this, export profiles would be very handy – the ability to set PDF settings and output folder options such a named folder, or the originating files folder. This would enable a user to select from a handful of scenarios or use existing profiles as starting points.
I’ve created a keyboard maestro for this but it’s very, very tedious and not that much faster (although less stressful) than doing it manually. By contrast I could export Finale files at a rate of one every couple of seconds.
to be fair, though, I’ve found Dorico produces PDFs much faster than Finale. In Finale, when I created PDF parts from a score, it invoked the distiller for each one individually, while Dorico seems to do this all in one go. For me its been a couple of seconds to create 30 files as opposed to Finale’s 5 to 10 seconds for each.