Help with formatting for educational exercises (entirely separate & unrelated systems?)

Dorico
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Hi there, I’m new to Dorico 4 Pro (having previously used Sibelius (free) and MuseScore). So far I’m loving it, though I do find a few things challenging for my goal of writing educational exercises. There are a few things I would like to achieve:

  1. Hide any cautionary keys/clefs/time sig – Often times, I’ll have a system of exercises where the following system on the same page are entirely unrelated exercises (perhaps addressing a different technique), or to be alternated on a different day. The cautionary elements aren’t necessary as they are irrelevant and I find it slightly distracting.

  2. Create headers and paragraphs to explain each exercise – Often times the exercise on a new system or few systems require a preface for the student, either to explain goals, advice, or variations of the exercise. (Or sometimes I may want a post-script after an exercise).
    I can of course add text or system text which is fine, but it appears to only work ok nothing more than a few words or a single line. However if I wanted a couple sentences, I can’t figure out the best way to force everything on the page down. I would like to do this before final engraving, I think? In case I wish to re-arrange systems or add more later on. I’m sort of thinking of this like a word processor, where the body of text will essentially move everything down accordingly.

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  1. Use flows! Entirely separate spans of music. If you don’t want a final barline at the end of these flows, you can change that. And allow flows to follow on the same page as a previous flow.

  2. Use text frames – either as part of an automatic flow heading, or separately. You can split flows across separate music frames, and put text frames in between. For one-offs, you can do this directly on the page if needed. But where you want to re-use the same arrangement of frames more than once, use a page template.

Some functionality and where to find features has changed this this video was made, but it might still be a useful demonstration in video form for you:

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Thanks Lillie! I mistakenly figured flows were almost like entirely separate pages/compositions/movements. That’s cool how you can use them in this way. So much still to learn haha. This video looks great and basically exactly what I’m looking to do, and/or at least gives me the tools to figure out how to customize exercises in my own way. Thanks again :slight_smile:

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