{@flowTitle@} not using correct field

I have a project with 2 flows named “Song (Bb)” and “Song (F)” They are two copes of the same material in different keys. I want the key to show up in the name so it will be obvious what the flows are for.

In the Flow information panel for Song (Bb) I have title: “Song” and subtitle “(Original key of Bb)”
In the Flow information panel for Song (F) I have title: “Song” and subtitle “(Alternate key of F)”

On my parts, I obviously want to print the Title (just “song” and not the key) and subtitle. However when I put {@flowTitle@} in my master page, It prints the flow name, not the flow TITLE.

I looked at the help entry for this and it seems to say there are some complications, but I couldn’t make any sense out of that. This looks like a bug. Why have a title field in the information panel if it isn’t going to be used for the {@flowTitle@} token?

It is no big deal in my case. I simply set my project title field to “Song” and used {@projectTitle@} in the master page. But I think it is a bug.

Please attach a project that demonstrates the problem.

Flow Name an Title are the same. But they can become out of sync. To keep in sync, edit the names in Setup mode on the bottom panel. If you edit the name/title in the Project info dialog, it will differ than what is in the Setup panel. The token will use whatever is in Project Info.

I guess that is what is happening, but I think that is a faulty design. Flow name and flow titles should NOT be the same thing. That is to say, it needs to be possible to have a tag I can include in my master pages. But that may not necessarily be how one would want the flows to be identified at the bottom of the SETUP page. In this case, I want the flows to all have the same song name because i am putting the differentiation in the subtitle with separate font & formatting. But I need to be able to see which flow is which in the setup page.

This isn’t the biggest problem ever. There are 3 or 4 work-arounds. But is just seems to be architecturally inelegant.

Flow name : Flow title = two different concepts, imho.

They are two separate concepts in Dorico. See the attachments.

Don’t use the bottom panel in Setup Mode. Use the File / Project Info dialog instead.


Project info dialog.png

OK. Thanks. But I’m still confused. I never could get {@flowTitle@} to display the characters that were in the Project Info Dialog at the right in the “Title” field. I guess I must have made the software confused by updating the flow name both from within the Project Info Dialog and also from the bottom of the setup screen. And I guess that’s what the Help article was trying to tell me. I think there is something broken here that probably isn’t too hard to make consistent. Again, it isn’t a big deal, but just one of those little things that might scare off a new user trying out the software.

For me, the token always shows whats in the Title field of Project Info. I can change the Name on the panel in Setup mode and this has no effect once the title has been edited in Project Info. So, not sure how you got that all wonky.

Again, if you really do have a project in which the {@flowTitle@} token doesn’t work as designed, please upload it or send to the team. This is abnormal.

The flow title in Project Info comes from the flow name in the Flows panel in Setup mode automatically, until such time as you change the flow title in Project Info directly. The reason for this is, say you have a couple of versions of the same flow in the project but you don’t want to end up with “Allegro WORKING SKETCH” appearing in the score - you can have “WORKING SKETCH” in the flow name, so you can tell them apart in Setup mode, but not have that in the flow title. If your flow title token isn’t showing what you expect, perhaps check that you had the intended flow selected in Project Info (and not e.g. the Project as a whole). It’s sometimes necessary as well to specify the flow in the token, e.g. {@flow1title@}, such as on title pages with no music frame.

If you never change title contents in Project Info, they should always use the flow name & be updated when you change it. IIRC this is the same for part layouts - their name automatically comes from the players assigned to them, until you manually change the layout name, e.g. from “Bass Drum & Sus. Cymbal & Cowbell” to “Percussion 1”

You could think about it like a master page override, if that helps? In that, if you’ve not made a change on a page, it uses the master page - if you edit the master page, that change is reflected on the page. But once you’ve made a change on a specific page, any further changes to the master page are not reflected on that page.

OK. I think I see what happened. When I went back to the file this morning, the title field (in the right side of the info dialog) has been CHANGED BACK to match the flow name – “Song (Bb)” and “Song (F)” I am certain I had changed these to remove the parenthesized key.

But I cannot recreate this sequence. It now seems to be working exactly as you say, but I struggled with this for 20 minutes the other day. I guess either I am losing my mind or else there is some peculiar sequence that throws things off. I don’t think I am losing my mind, but that’s what all crazy people say.

I’ll keep an eye out if it ever happens again.
Thanks.

One thing that might be a contributing factor is that I don’t think the “depart window” or “lose focus” methods are always working ideally here. It is too easy to lose data that has been entered on one panel if you are not very careful to always click the APPLY button before leaving or witching to another pane within the dialog. I think one scenario is if you enter information in a flow pane, then click to the project pane to copy the flow info to the project, the updated flow information may not yet be registered, so that causes the wrong data to be copied.

You should find that within the same editing session in the dialog, it does successfully keep track of changes you make to each flow and to the project itself, until you click Apply. If you can find any reproducible steps that show the dialog not remembering something you entered for one flow, then I’d be interested to know about them.

Daniel, I hammered on it for 10 minutes today and it worked as you say. I know I have gotten tripped up in this area numerous times, so I will try to pay more attention.