My main uses for Dorico are 3-4 minute pop and classical crossover scores and I’m coming from Sibelius.
I understand Flows may be useful for classical music or Medleys where there are different passages of music with different players and its nice to separate them.
However I dont understand how to organise the score as it is for simple tasks. I want a heading on my main page for song title and a writer and I dont want a Flow heading also beneath it - it doesnt make sense to name the song twice! I’ve yet not found a way to satisfy Dorico easily with this and I feel like I dont have the concept down. I’ve looked in the manual and it explains flows etc but not my use case.
On a simple pop chart for say melody and guitar chords how do I set up the score simply where I dont have a Title heading AND a flow heading.
Why when I choose individual Players / score parts in the Setup Tab does the flow title re-appear (1. Flow 1)… (and another problem my Project title I set for Full Score now says ‘Untitled Project 1’ on individual Part/Player view but is properly titled in Full Score view)
Layout Options are separate for each Layout - ensure you’ve correctly applied for all layouts in the right panel of the dialog.
My guess is you typed over the placeholder title in the score layout, which is not a good workflow. Type your title into the Project Info dialog (Ctrl/Cmd+I)
Like in the case of your classical cross over, I’ve used one flow to hold the original Mozart score, and one for the edit/transcription. I’ve used one to hold some unstructured ideas separate from the actual score I’m working on, and I’ve used them to group songs with similar VST instruments / settings in the same project for my convenience and not having to re-load libraries when I switch between. Yah, there are other ways to use templates or multiple scores, but having just one “thing” to open or close is convenient at times. Not that I’m that creative or experienced in using them.
gdball, some cool ideas for “working-flows” there, thanks.
In my very early days with Dorico, I too made the mistake of ignoring the Project Info page, and typing over the placeholder title. That’s partly because all the modes and panels are very obviously “in your face”, but the Project Info page is comparitively hidden away in Setup mode. There may be a case to be made for making the Project Info dialog more obvious somehow.
And, it always frustrates me that when you open the Project Info dialog, it defaults to Flow 1, rather than Project. Like the original poster, I also typically work with just one flow per project, so everytime I go to Project Info I have to remember to change to Project before entering anything.
I totally agree. Double clicking on the text on your score sheet - if this is not the way to change title info and flow titles then what is the purpose of it as it is. Should it not bring up the Project info dialog instead - all which would make the program more intuitive to use for a new user!
How would you go about editing what fields appeared at the top of the score, if it brought up the Project Info dialog? Some people sometimes need “Arranged by {@projectArranger@}” or “Lyrics by {@projectLyricist@}” or any number of other things. Sure, it often makes sense to do this in the Master Page Editor (thus changing every instance where the First Master Page is used), or in the Flow Heading Editor (thus changing every instance where that flow heading is used) but equally there’s a need to be able to edit individual instances.
I guess the developers could think up some clever way of launching the Project Info by Alt+double-clicking any text frame that already contains at least one token (for instance), or by reversing this suggestion so that you double-click to launch Project Info or Alt+double-click to edit the actual text frame. Either way, somebody would moan that the Alt+ behaviour is a hidden feature and thus it’s unintuitive. I don’t see how the developers can win, here.
I guess the developers could think up some clever way of launching the Project Info by Alt+double-clicking any text frame that already contains at least one token (for instance), or by reversing this suggestion so that you double-click to launch Project Info or Alt+double-click to edit the actual text frame. Either way, somebody would moan that the Alt+ behaviour is a hidden feature and thus it’s unintuitive. I don’t see how the developers can win, here.
Well, there could be a dialog that appears when you double-click on the title: “Would you like to open the Project Info window?” or something like that. But it would probably have to be a modal dialog, which could be intrusive. A tough design decision - making a giant, complex program is really hard!
I think this is the distinction between “easy to learn” and “easy to use”.
You only have to learn “how tokens work in text boxes” once. After that, there are already easy ways to open the Project Info dialog or edit a text frame, depending on which you want to do.
The down side of making this sort of thing “easier to learn” is that you have to click through an extra layer of pop-up windows for ever after.