Importing Flows with Ossias

Hi all.

I am building a new version of an older (now very messy and inaccurate) project flow by flow, by exporting separate flows from the old project and importing them into the new project one at a time as I work on them.

The one Layout I wish to keep largely the same (a piano conductor layout) has quite a lot of ossias. But I’m hitting a problem importing these.

Despite the Layout and Instrument being named identically in the old and new projects, when I import the flow (selecting 'Merge With Existing Players…") it does not copy the layout into the corresponding layout in my new project.

The Ossias are frequently added & removed throughout a flow (with +1/-1 Staff signposts).
But: even when trying to work around this, it does not seem possible to copy and paste the Ossias, along with the piano grand staff they’re attached to, INCLUDING the -1/+1 staff commands, in order to move them into the right layout.

My only workaround at the moment is to manually create blank ossias in the blank piano conductor staff I’m copying to, then copy/past the +1/-1 Signposts separately so the ossias go back to appearing in the right places…

Got another 25 or so flow to do. Can anyone suggest how I can make this simpler please?!

Was the older project also in Dorico? (I am guessing that is so.)

Yes, am exporting from Dorico 4.0.1 0 and importing into Dorico 4.0.10

I don’t think you’re missing anything, unfortunately. The difficulty is that the information stored in the item that describes the change in staff visibility are keyed off the specific internal values used for a particular instrument in a particular flow. These have to be explicitly remapped by Dorico as part of the copy and paste operation, and I suspect that this isn’t set up for copying these types of items – I will ask a colleague about this to be sure.

Are you sure that recreating these flows is the best way to complete the project? What kind of a mess do you have that you feel you can’t resolve directly in the original flows?

Thanks for your input Daniel.

I guess the Copy & Paste question really just came up because Dorico wasn’t putting the material in the Layout I would have hoped for when importing the Flow. I think it is actually retaining all the information. Just in the wrong place. (It’s going to a different piano layout, instead of the Piano Conductor layout).

Apart from this, yes - re-importing the flows is working well for me as it’s more non-destructive and ensures I keep track of what I have re-done/edited and that no old material is left behind (it’s pretty much a rewrite of everything except the piano conductor part. but a lot of work has gone into the piano conductor part, and it’s structurally right…)