Import house styles in Dorico 2?

Is this possible yet? My publisher wants me to use Sibelius until Dorico can import house styleS. Thanks!!

Can’t you tweak a Dorico project so it resembles the Sibelius house style? Then use that project as a starting point for importing?
James, actually if you want to work with Dorico for a publisher, it is a good idea to get to know the software quite well beforehand…

James, Dorico will never be able to import house styles from Sibelius. Sibelius file formats are proprietary and Avid own the copyrights and the patents. Dorico is owned by Steinberg.

Just as you can’t import Finale libraries into Sibelius, or Sibelius house styles into Finale, you won’t be able to import house styles from Sibelius into Dorico.

k_b’s suggestions are good.

Perhaps the issue described by the OP is not that his publisher wants him to import a Sibelius house style, but rather that he wants assurances that the same kinds of consistency provided by a house style in Sibelius can be achieved in Dorico.

The best way to achieve that for the time being is to have an empty Dorico project (no flows, no that has all of your preferred options, master pages, etc., and then use that as a receptacle into which you can import flows from other projects: when you import a flow into an existing project, the options etc. of the project into which you import the flow will be used.

Daniel, if I make my choices of the various Notation, Engraving Settings, etc; and then Save those As Default, presumably that gets saved to a file somewhere. Is it advisable to transfer those files to another installation? Or is better to transfer a document, and then save the defaults from there?

Yes, it’s fine to transfer those settings: look in your ~/Library/Application Support/Steinberg/Dorico 2 folder and you’ll see e.g. userLibrary.xml (which has things like paragraph and character styles, accidental types, playing techniques, chord symbols, etc. saved in it), notationOptions.xml, engravingOptions.xml, etc. – all of those can be copied to another machine into the corresponding place and your saved settings will thus be migrated.

Thanks for the feedback, Parker. Unfortunately at the moment you can’t use the same key commands file on your desktop computer and on your iPad, for two reasons: firstly, the way the key commands are described on the iPad is technically different in a few subtle ways; and secondly, there’s presently no good place to put those kinds of settings that you could manually migrate between systems. Perhaps one day we will have a cloud-based answer for syncing settings between different devices, tied to your Steinberg ID.

As for house styles, you can already achieve much of that functionality by thinking about it in reverse: instead of importing the house style into a project with existing music, you can import music into a project that already has the house style you want to use. Let me know if you want more details about that.

However, we certainly do plan to improve both the ability to migrate settings and options between projects, and to create and manage your own template files, in future versions of the software.

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