I’m wondering if there’s a Key command that I’m accidentally hitting occasionally…?
Lately several of my part layouts seem to randomly add incorrect flows.
Just opened the Musical I’m working on, which has around 30 flows.
Over the past few days, having created some Instrument parts for print out, when I return to the project later and call up the layouts I discover that random flows have been added to the layout. Easy to remove of course but it’s all rather odd, and has never happened until about two weeks ago - my usage habits haven’t changed, unless I’ve stumbled across some Key Command that I hitting in error?
Anyone else? Suggestions? I’m very particular when I create a new Layout to select “remove all flows” and then add just the one I need. As I need to keep the headings I never create a layout from more than one flow, so it’s really not a likely self-made error.
Is it possible that you’re creating the flows later than creating the part layouts? Part layouts hold all flows by default; that is to say that when you create a new flow, it’ll automatically assign to all Full Score and Part layouts. If you really want to assign manually, use the Custom layout type - this is its purpose.
Thanks for the answer but no, all the flows have been created long ago, and the parts are now literally parts for players, no new flows in this project for months.
That’s what I meant when I said I automatically click “remove all flows” when I create a new layout, as this is the default - which I never need.
And the difference between Custom and Part layouts is why I have to create Part layouts for my piano / vocal score for example: using custom layout does not give me the left top “part” details (another Elements limitation I guess) that I want.
You can tell your custom score layout to use the Part master page set instead, if you like. Any layout can use any master page set, it’s just set up by default so that scores (full and custom) use the Default Score master page set whereas parts use the Default Part master page set.
You can also force flows always to start on a new page, and use the First master page for every flow starting at the top of the page, if you want the beginning of every flow to look like it’s page 1. That way you could keep all flows in the same layout with (hopefully, if I’ve understood correctly) the formatting you want?
Thanks Lillie - that’s useful to know.
I’ve always wondered if I’m using the different layouts in the most useful / efficient manner. Like a lot of people (I’m sure!) I just dived in and started using Dorico with as little manual reading as possible, so it is more than likely I’m not getting the best from it.
In my case - or at least for two major projects I’m currently working on, I’ve assumed that the best way to work is to use one flow for each “song”, and then a Custom layout for each song / flow, with all the instruments in that song (the instrumental forces vary per song, though of course with a total limit of 12 - Elements), and a Part layout for players / singers - some single instrument parts, some with top line guide etc.
It has never occurred to me to create another “Full Score” as I’ve assumed this was intended for literally that, the entire project. But are you suggesting that I could / should create a Full Score for each song? A full score that only contains one flow - is that good practice? So many options!
I’ll look into the master page set up more now, though as you may have guessed from the screen grabs, I’d edited the tokens on my Part & Custom layouts (per layout, not a global thing as I’m not sure how to do that in Elements) to change the left hand Lyricist token to “flowsubtitle” - and put my Cue info in the Layout info subtitle - and added the Lyricist below my Composer token on the right. This does detrimentally alter the formatting of certain objects in the score when PDF’d or printed, but it’s OK for player / stage use. I will have to duplicate the entire project to create the Publishing version anyway (without cues and performer directions)
If I am able to create (in Elements) a selectable Master page with these edited attributes that would of course save me some time. But as I said…reading the manual is generally not my first port of call, until I get stuck.
I know, in too much of a hurry…! But thanks for your input.
Generally speaking, one layout suffices for the score, and one layout suffices for each of the parts. I’ve certainly worked musicals (albeit shortish ones for children) with this method.
I suppose in Elements you’re coming up against all sorts of problems with not being able to put tokens on master pages, and in that context I guess your method of one layout per song per player is a way around the problem.
If you’re happy with the way that Elements works in every other respect, you might see if there’s a way you could get your hands on a 30 day trial of Pro, set up some master pages and flow headings that do the things you need them to do, in order that you can go the more conventional route of one layout per player, containing the whole show.
SE and Elements do have hard limits, and I’m not sure I’d want to work an entire musical in either of them.
That’s exactly what I was thinking…!
