The hymnal I am working on is forcing me to re-learn everything about frames and formatting. A good thing!
Of course, I cannot extend the green text-frame beyond the set page-margins. What I need to be able to do is bring the ‘12’ below exactly flush with the top and left margin and to be able to set the text-frame in Properties such I can do that with only a few clicks.
Moreover, I’d love in Master Pages to put together a text-frame such bringing such text flush with desired page-margins is automatic without having to adjust every single text-frame in every single hymn.
@dan_kreider, I am putting every hymn into a separate project file. Putting all the hymns into one-or-more multi-flow project files creates a situation in which when I change the extent of a music-frame, text frames stay put, forcing me to potentially re-do text-frames for hundreds of hymns at a time.
Possibly, linking text-frames with music/graphic frames in some way could fix this.
Dorico doesn’t have the very fine typography controls of a high-end desktop publishing application, so it isn’t able to automatically compensate for the left side-bearing of the first character in a left-aligned text frame as some other applications might be able to.
If this is a hard requirement from your client, then you might be better off just bringing the music and lyrics out of Dorico and then adding page furniture such as page numbers, headers, etc. in your desktop publishing application that has these kinds of features built-in.
In the fullness of time it would be wonderful for Dorico to have these kinds of features built-in, but that’s certainly not something that’s going to happen imminently.
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Agree, I strongly recommend doing the automatic numbering in InDesign. It’ll adjust the numbers beautifully as you add, delete, and insert. No extra work needed. I’ve done hymnals as large as 700 hymns with this method, no problem.
And I agree one song per project is the way. 
I’ve just forced myself into upgrading my Adobe plan. I will be watching InDesign tutorials for the next few days - lol.
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A ridiculously bloated and complex program, but insanely powerful. Especially GREP. Godspeed.
I’ve been watching tutorial videos for the past hour or so. This program will be an absolute cliff to climb, but a joy to use once I get used to it.
Price has always kept me away from Adobe, but I’ve been using Acrobat for certain things (mainly signing documents). Thanks for all your words on your experience with doing hymnals with Dorico. You were the individual who steered me to one-‘song’-per-project file.
After years of Dorico, I’m finding InDesign’s UI not completely foreign.
I see in a different forum-thread, you ‘switched’ to Affinity Publisher in January 2022. Have you gone back to InDesign for hymnals, then?
Yes, APub was a horrible experience for me. Leaky memory, weird way of placing multi-page PDFs, lots of crashes. Some folks on this forum have had a good experience with it, but I didn’t.
I was relieved to return to ID.
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With ID, how has your experience with matching font-sizes between Dorico and ID been? I’m using absolute instead of staff-relative.
Also, for overflow verse-text, do you put that text in Dorico or do you just wait until you get the music into ID?
Once you set the lyric size to absolute, it’s absolute. I do Minion Pro 9.8-pt, and it’s totally consistent across all software.
I do the extra block text in Dorico, generally, since it’s an intrinsic part of the song.
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