How to save a picture in an exported Page Template Set?

Dorico
1

We have created for our publications Page Template Sets containing, in addition to the Default and First page, extra page definitions like Inside cover P and Outside cover P. The Outside and Inside cover pages contain images like a company logo and other graphical elements. When we export such a Page Template Set, to a file like Company template.dorico apparently the name of the image file, or the image file itself, does not get incorporated in the exported file. (When looking with a programmer’s editor into the .dorico file, we could not find anything.) The frames containing the images are defined:
image

When importing the Company template.dorico into another project, the frames are filled with a diagonal cross, and we have to fill them again.
Or are we overlooking something? Does anyone know a workaround?
Thanks for your suggestions.

2

@Robrecht_Paternoster, I may be in a minority, but I don’t think it is appropriate for you to seek free advice to advance your corporate enterprise.

3

I haven’t figured this out either. I might be wrong, but the exported graphicFrameChain definition doesn’t seem to have any mechanism to incorporate an embedded or linked image:

graphic
graphic762×268 24.1 KB

In your template, the “Outside cover P” template is referencing frameChainDefinitionID #21 so you could scroll up and see how that is defined, but I’m not sure that it’s possible to export a Page Template Set and have it include an embedded or linked graphic. I’d love to be wrong about that though.

4

Dear @Janus ,
We are not seeking free advice… We are pointing to an issue that we suspect other users share with us. And should we find a solution for the problem, we will publish it here for free, as we do with any other advice we give here to other Dorico users. That’s our way to thank the community for the assistance we receive from them.
Warm greetings, Robrecht

5

The only other occurrence of that FrameChain in the .dorico file is here:

image

You see there is no reference to an internal or external image object. We would have expected that the reference to an external file would be here…

6

Yeah, that’s where I would expect it too. I’m guessing that it’s currently just not possible to export a Page Template Set and have it include an image. You could have a “master default” file that already has the image embedded and always start from that, but there are drawbacks to not being able to start from File/New as some info is embedded into the file at the point of file creation.

7

Images are likely incorporated into pages via a relative link rather than an absolute link; so when one adds a template set to a new file, one changes the origin of the reference and that throws the link off.

That’s my guess.

8

Hello @Derrek , we could not find any absolute nor relative link in these .dorico files. Did you find one?

9

At the moment, images are not directly embedded in page templates, and there’s no way to reference an external file in such a way that it will be automatically pulled in when you use the page template. We do plan to change this so that graphics get encoded directly in the page template, but it’s not risen to the top of our priority list yet, I’m afraid.

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10

Hello @dspreadbury , thanks for the input.
If we find a workaround, we’ll publish it here. I understand from

that it may not be solved in Dorico 5 yet, so it’s worthwhile for us to find another solution.

11

Perhaps you can save a “clean” file with the graphics, which you can use as a starting point for new projects.

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12

That’s sort of what I was suggesting with a “master default” file, but there are some drawbacks to this as there are a bunch of elements that get embedded with the file at the time of creation. There definitely is some advantage to being able to start with File/New. I have no idea what all is embedded, but here are a few things I’ve come across:

  1. Some font info, I think from Preferences/“Default text font family.” There was a bug (now fixed) from maybe 6 months ago where I had some chord symbols reverting back to a font I hadn’t used in well over a year,. That font also didn’t appear anywhere in my file or userlibrary.xml so I had no idea where Dorico was pulling that info from. It turned out that it was a font specified back when my “master” file had been created.
  2. Some instrument definitions. There was a bug where the Tenor Sax range was incorrectly specified, but changing it in the instruments.xml file had no effect. This too was information that was embedded back when the file was originally created so couldn’t be updated.
  3. Instrument orders. This is an easy one to test. Dorico incorrectly lists Clarinet in A before Clarinet in Bb in the score order. If you make the edit to correct this in the instrumentScoreOrders.xml file, then anything from File/New will show the correct order, but applying Sort Players to an existing file won’t as the order has been embedded.

It was sort of the realization that there is an advantage to using File/New that lead me down the doricolib rabbit hole in the first place, as I didn’t want all my customized settings to be linked to a file that would have elements that couldn’t be easily updated when a future version was released. Well designed Page Templates with graphics obviously are very valuable, but it’s likely the work creating them may have to be redone in the future to take advantage of new features that won’t update because they were previously embedded in the file.

13

Hello fellows,
Thanks for the advice.
I tried this afternoon to save our project as a new project template, and then created a new project from that project template. I got some strange side-effects, but maybe that’s a remainder of peculiarities in our original project. I’ll test tomorrow also both your suggestions and let you know what appears to be the best workaround.
Thanks for thinking with us! Robrecht

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