Feature request: Graphic Slices linked to Flows and not pages

Hi there,

I find the new Graphic Slices tool very helpful in general, and especially for inserting in articles and websites, and workbook work! It was a very nice surprise in the last update.

My one issue with it is if I insert a new example/new flow to my workbook or planned article layout, I have to keep it at the end of a project and not in the correct order, for if I move the flow to its correct place in the workbook, I have to redo all my Graphic Slices (this also happens with any reformatting of the score, all the slices get misplaced). This is because—from what I understand—Graphic Slices, like Graphic Frames, are linked to pages and not to Flows or staff or measure number.

Has anyone found a workaround for this?

If not, does anyone else want the option of Graphic Frames or Slices attaching to Flows/staffs/or measures in a future version of Dorico? Or would I be the one person requesting this feature from the fabulous Dorico Team?

I do a lot of educational materials, and I have just started with the graphic slices. So I have not run into this issue yet.

I like your idea, and think it should be considered. However, you can name the slices anything you want so I am not always 100% order really matters? Unless you have a workbook that is mostly laid out in Dorico, with some graphics taken from other parts of Dorico.

I certainty like your idea though. It would help to keep you more organized when you have 100s of graphics.

Robby

Whle I don’t disagree that there would certainly be use cases for this, this is unlikely to change any time soon; graphic slices are frames and thus operate in the domain of pages, not in the domain of flows and musical material.

I agree with you, this would be an incredible feature!

Good Afternoon! Any chance that this will be updated in the next version?
An Example of why this is so important to fix: I have a workbook of 100+ examples of basic orchestration techniques and their respective repertoire examples, and the Flows logically follow each other: unison doubling, octave doubling, multi-octave doubling etc… As I’m building my education document, I am exporting slices as I go and meticulously labelling them so they are organized for pedagogical purposes. As is natural when building an educational document, I realize I need more examples. Example 1 is a unison doubling. I decide that I want Example 2 to be a second example of unison doubling, so I duplicate my flow and edit my example. I then go to export the Slice, and find out that now all 99+ of the following slices now have the wrong name and wrong size slice box, as each Flow has been nudged over one because the slices are attached to frames!
I now have to drag example 2 to the end of all the flows (which is not easy as dragging doesn’t work very well, it takes several attempts, I wish there was an easier way to reorder flows), just to fix everything and export 1 slice. And if I want to add an extra example for each orchestral technique, this becomes a huge time consuming effort…
I think it is vital to give the user the choice to of whether they want graphics or graphic slices to be connected to a frame or to a specific flow or measure. I plead with you to please add this feature (I think I’ve been asking for this kind of thing—in terms of graphics, not graphic slices—since Dorico 1.0, so it’s not a new request).

This doesn’t answer your request, but on the specific point about reordering flows - you can now do that in the Project Info dialog, rather than dragging flow cards in the Flows panel in Setup mode.

It seems to me that really you don’t want the graphic slices feature, but rather you want a means of exporting every flow in your project as a separate graphic, regardless of where it is located in the layout.

I’d like to put in my voice for these slices to be linked to flows, not pages.

I have a large number of flows representing educational examples, similar to @mountainmusic above. These examples are different sizes, so I need slices to adjust the size of each graphic export.

I’m keeping these flows in the order they appear in the textbook. But if I need to insert a flow, the graphic slices are all messed up. The slices are actually ruined then, because I can’t move them to their appropriate spot, and if I re-export any of them, all my PDFs are now incorrectly labeled (that is, what was once 3.5 is now 3.4, etc). It makes no sense from a user perspective to link slices to pages… they need to be linked to the material itself.

Obviously I don’t know what sort of development cost that would be, but this would be a huge help.

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Hi Daniel,

Part of the problem is that while frames of music move as flows are reordered the associated text frames and graphics frames do not. See attached screenshots:


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It would be useful is these associated items moved together.

It’s not the music frames that move from one page to another, but their content „spills“ over to the next frame.
I assume there is currently no way to link a frame to the content of another frame (which is again: dynamic, it’s more like a window through which you can see the music, rather than a „page of a Book“ which is placed on the music page.)

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