When a Flow starts a new page, I want to use the First Master titling, and I DON’T want the Flow Header to show. I have “Show Flow Headers” set to “Not for First Flow” – but that seems to refer to page 1 only.
There is an option to remove the Master titling from above the Flow Header, but that’s not what I want.
That’s what I have, but I’m still getting the Headers. The problem is that some Flows need a bit of secondary text (which I’ve put in the “Subtitle” field).
Ah, OK, I see. How about defining a second flow heading that includes the subtitle, and then using a flow heading change to use that flow heading for the pages that start with those flows?
At the moment, you can’t use only the ‘First’ master page and not flow headings after the first page of the layout. Hopefully the above approach will prove suitable, but if not, let me know.
Thanks. I’ll give it a go. The trouble is that the mid-page headings tend not to have the subtitles.
I would have thought that Flow Headings would be ‘assigned’ to Flows themselves, rather than pages. So for instance, you couldn’t change the header on the third flow of a page.
No, I elaborated on this design decision a bit in response to a question from Florian in the Scoring Notes review, which you can find if you scroll down it. Let me know how you get on.
Hmm. I think I’m going to have to rethink how the Stage Directions work.
I think I’ll have to attach them as Text to the Music. I really need something that creates more space when the text is there.
Surely, any Flow at the top of the page that uses the First Master will also have a Flow Header? That seems unnecessary.
Another option is not to have a “first” master page format (that is used every time a flow happens to start at the top of a page) at all, but have a different format for the first page (only) of score if that needs extra title information. A manual override of the format of “page 1” isn’t going to cause any knock-on formatting problems if the length of the score changes - page 1 is always page 1.
I’m still figuring out the “best” way to use these tools though. I need to make some time to look at half a dozen published scores, in different formats, and see how they would map onto Dorico’s master pages and headers.
Yes, I think Rob’s suggestion is a good one. Make it so that your ‘First’ master page works in conjunction with flow headers, and define another custom master page to use for the very first music page in the layout.
Yes, I think I’m resigned to not using First Masters beyond page 1. That seems to be pointless now we have Flow Headers, despite the options to use them on “flow-pages”.
How I incorporate different styles of Flow header, depending on whether they need a subtitle or not, I’m not sure, without doing manual over-rides to pages…
I suppose my question to you would be: is it ever the case that you would need a flow with a subtitle starting somewhere other than the top of a page? If so, then using the ‘First’ master page wouldn’t provide a solution in any case.
We made two assumptions in the design of this feature: firstly, that you would rarely have multiple flows on the same page that would require different flow headings, which is why flow heading changes work on a per-page basis (like all of the other page layout features); and secondly, that you would only need to make any final adjustments to this kind of thing towards the end of the preparation process, at which point the impact of per-page overrides is reduced.
There is one limitation in the current design, compared with Lilypond (which has had this sort of thing for years, but without the graphical interface!). That is that (like all other text frames) flow headers are a fixed size, even though their position can “float” on the page.
If they resized themselves vertically according to the size of the contents, issues like Benwiggy’s “optional subtitles” would disappear.
(You can put multi-line text in any of the boxes in Project Info - you just have to create it in a text editor and copy-and-paste it into the box. Maybe it wasn’t meant to work that way, but it does!)
I’ve reconfigured the design to fit more with the paradigm, and that seems to be producing better results.
One tiny problem remains: I’ve used {@projectTitle@} in my Default running header, which doesn’t respond to the options for Hiding Above a Flow Header.
That is true: currently it only hides {@flowTitle@}, but we can probably extend this. I’ll talk to Andrew about it tomorrow.
Thanks, Daniel. For the moment, I’ll have to delete headers manually. (I’m also using “Other Information” in the headers!)
However, after trying out a variety of things, I really would ask for an option that Flow Headings can be hidden on “subsequent First” Masters. It would seem to provide a useful flexibility, allowing the Flow Title to be presented at a different size, position, etc.
For instance: in an opera score, the start of each Act might use the First master; with Flow Headings being used after that for each aria/recit.
If I apply the First Master to Act 2’s front page, I get the Heading in the way. (And the FlowTitle token doesn’t seem to work from the Master, but that might be something else.)
As applying the Master is an override anyway, I can just delete the Heading on that page, but if I had the option, I wouldn’t need any overrides.
Couldn’t you achieve the same thing, though, by not including the movement/flow title in your ‘First’ master page and instead using flow headings for all flows, including the first? Then the very first page of the layout and all other pages in the layout that use the ‘First’ master page would contain the same information?
That said, your request is certainly reasonable, so we’ll see what we can do!
Yes, currently, I’m using a “First” Master devoid of any titling and headers, for use on pages where a Flow happens to start on a new page.
Page 1, and any pages that require additional text descriptions below the heading, have to be done manually. Though it occurs to me that I could try using an entirely empty Flow Heading Master for those pages, with a Custom Master page…?
That sounds similar to what I’m doing in a project (a set of exercises) where the flow headings consist of a title followed by a paragraph of text. I’m (ab)using the “Other Information” field in the Project Info to hold the text for each flow, rather than overriding the pages in the score. The Master Page for the flow heading just says {@flowOtherInfo@} is formatted as a justified paragraph in the appropriate font.
The only problem with this is that the flow heading has a fixed depth - but that’s not a big deal for this particular project, since all the text paragraphs are about the same length.
Another restriction is that you can’t use any text formatting within the text coming from the Project Info - but again that’s not a problem in my particular case.
UPDATE: Yes, the easiest way to “delete” a Flow Heading is to create an “Empty” Flow Heading master. Then apply a Flow Heading change for that page. You can then apply a different Custom Master page with whatever titling layout you want.
