I read through this thread about tab stops: tab stops in text frame. As I understand things, Dorico 5.1 has only “pre-packaged” and unchangeable tab stops for text boxes. That’s probably fine for most use cases.
However, I am facing a use case where I’d like to be able to put in a tab stop that will right justify the text all the way to the right edge of the text box while having the text to the left of that tab stop be either at the left margin or at one of the predetermined tab stops.
Use case: In a non-English hymnal the author and copyright data involves a lot more text than just a name or two and a copyright line.
At the bottom of the page in a text box I would like the original language name of the work at the top left (using the token {@ProjectSubtitle@}) while the tune name and meter (using another token) would be on that same line but justified to the right margin. Underneath would be another paragraph with the text of the author/copyright data (a third token). I think this is currently impossible, but if I’m wrong, please let me know how to do it.
Hi, and thank you, @Mats_Frendahl,
The idea of two separate text boxes with different justification is something I also considered. Because the copyright / author data for each hymn will be of a different length (number of lines), that method won’t work if the original language title and the tune name are above the copyright data. I have thought of putting them below the author/copyright text – that would work. It’s not what I would prefer, but it may be acceptable.
Thank you for the idea!
Eric
@dan_kreider, Thanks for that info! Sounds hopeful. How do you do it? I would think there would be a ruler above the text box where you could see the type of tab (as in InDesign and Affinity Designer and Viva Designer) - left tab, center tab, right tab (they also have decimal).
It’s fiddly. You have to do some math to calculate the width of the frame (I use points). Then set your right tab stop back maybe two points. So if your frame is 400 pts wide, set a right tab stop at 398 points. Using the properties panel at the bottom.
If you set the tab stop to the exact width, it’s a little erratic.
I’m back to trying to do this. I clicked inside of the text box where I hope to put a nearly-right-justified tab and clicked Command-8 to open the Properties Panel at the bottom. But this is all I see:
@dan_kreider, This is working perfectly! I really like how it looks now, and I can include the title of the source hymn in a relatively unobtrusive place. @Mats_Frendahl, I’ve decided to go ahead and put the tune’s name and original work’s name below the author/copyright info, which I could have done with your suggestion of two separate text frames. However, I think it’ll be easier to manipulate the size of the frame later (if needed) if I now keep all the text in one frame.
@Mats_Frendahl, That’s an interesting idea. But I haven’t figured out how to do it. I thought I’d at least see what it looked like. The leading setting only affects leading within a paragraph, not vertical space before or after a paragraph.
So I don’t know how to achieve that other than maybe putting in a return character (adding an empty paragraph) and shrinking it down in size… I tried it, but had no success.
I put one character in that “empty” paragraph and then made it white (so it does not print)… I set it to 2pt, and got this:
A line with a small (white) text seems to be a solution until Dorico gets more advanced paragraph formatting.
This
seems to ‘go live’ today (Feb 7, 2024) at 17:00 European time. In German, but I guess one can learn from the visuals alone.
Personally, I’d never do such a complex publication in Dorico, but alternatives might involve costly subscription plans (Adobe…). I have never used Affinity Publisher myself but the price is far from Adobe’s and a ‘one-off payment’. @dan_kreider knows a lot about this kind of publication in general.
