I just finished the first draft of a project that required more than 130 musical excerpts. I always thought the concept of graphic slices was a great idea, but always in the abstract. Then I actually needed it… and it was phenomenal. A life-saver. Thank you to the team for this.
A few suggestions:
Remembering slices? When I create some slices on certain flows and then delete those flows, the slices vanish as expected. But when I later add additional flows and click “create slice,” those slices are re-populated in their original page and dimensions, which I don’t necessarily want. If the flows have been deleted, I don’t want Dorico to “remember” the slices; instead, I expect to re-create them using click-drag. It’s not a huge deal, just a UX suggestion.
Duplicate dimensions. I often want slices that are the exact same dimension. I don’t know how this would best be accomplished, but it would be nice to be able to somehow duplicate the same size frames without having to manually type in numerical values (which is how I did it).
Convert to curves (paths). These examples all had to be imported into a Word document (an external requirement of the project), and I was absolutely committed to keeping them vectored, so PNG was out. Word can’t import PDFs, or at least not reliably. SVG was the way to go… but of course SVG does not embed font data, so anyone viewing the Word doc needed to have all the fonts installed to display the examples correctly. What I ended up doing was exporting everything as PDFs, then using Cloud Convert to convert them to SVGs, checking the option to also convert text-to-path. It worked beautifully. It would be a huge help if Dorico could convert to path when exporting an SVG, since I imagine the user would always want the SVG to function like a picture: a predictable visual output, no matter who was viewing it.
Oh yes #3. There’s no sense offering pdf and svg if they will essentially export the same; to my mind PDFs should have font data, while svgs are just fancy vector images, as such. I’ve been surprised on occasion when I’ve imported svgs elsewhere that didn’t render the text in the image correctly; I was expecting everything to be outlined and not a pdf simple jazzed up in a different file container.
Many thanks for this, Dan @dan_kreider. I agree about Graphic Slices being a great invention.
+1 for #2 - being able to set a standard dimension to copy or duplicate would be very useful.
Yours is a timely post, because I am in the middle of making quite a few graphic slices myself for a music theory course. The workflow I have devised is to use a different document for each sub-heading within each chapter, so I never have more than, say twenty graphic slices in any one file. I use a new flow for each example.
Also, I note that there are boxes for height and width in the Properties Panel for each slice, but they are greyed out for me. Using Left, Top, Right, and Bottom, especially when they are distances from the edge of the page (I think) is awkward for me.
The reason for that is because your slice dimensions are locked to the page margins. on the left panel, click on the right and bottom blue lock icons to unlock.
OK - thanks. I suppose Height and Width must be “prepared for.” As an organist, I am used to that terminology - you reach for the Ophicleide and the stop is stuck in, because they ran out of money before finishing it, but they have prepared a space for it.
The quarter note stems are down because the exercise is “Add a note above the given note to make the interval of a fifth.” and so on. Good catch, though. Thanks.
I’m making some teaching materials for new pupils, training them how to read music.
Dorico made it super easy to create these PDF’s to use in a Google Classroom quiz.
Like @dan_kreider I’d like to quickly duplicate slices that are the same dimension. I had to do this manually, which wasn’t impossible, but a Copy and Paste, or Duplicate function for slices would be great.
Attached is a video of how I duplicated most of the slices, the file with all of the notes I want for a “Name the Notes” quiz, and some of the PDF’s.
@dspreadbury : Is there any perspective that Dorico will give the possibility to generate SVG’s with text converted in curves, in the near future? @dan_kreider mentions in another post that he uses CloudConvert to do that. But that platform may not give the desired results if you are using not-commonly used fonts (in our case Museo fonts).
I do think CloudConvert is a safe bet, since I have always used it with fonts I created myself, and it has always rendered them correctly. But I do still hope this option will be added for SVG slices at some point.
I used to be mildly ambivalent about this (barring specific issues every now and again) but I’ve since realized the wisdom in converting to curves. Now that my favorite font has been removed from my system due to an OS update, suddenly certain things do not want to render correctly, and I would have been spared this woe if the SVGs had been converted to curves.
I see value in both approaches (having embedded text data, and just being a straight up vector image) but if this feature gets implemented, I will definitely start exporting both versions to have more fixed archival images as backups.
We have defined Museo Slab 300 Regular as the Default Text font in the Paragraph Styles.
You see that the left image presents quite some flaws:
The Museo fonts are replaced by (I guess) Arial fonts.
In the left upper corner, and in the centre of the footer, there is a ZapfDingbats symbol, namely a red circle. Apparently, the font is not rendered correctly.
As a result of the fonts not being correct, the spacing of the words and the alignment of the titles is not correct either. On the left, it happens that lines with text are not displayed completely, words are just cut off.
What’s more: when we look at the SVG’s on a Mac, we have similar issues, even when the same fonts are installed on both Windows and Mac. We suspect that comes from the fact that the Museo fonts have different definitions in Windows and MacOS, for example:
Windows: Font = Museo Slab 300, Style = regular
Mac: Font = Museo Slab, Style = 300 (and the regular doesn’t appear)
Word 365 is really not a solution. We are talking about huge amounts of SVG’s to be handled, preferably in batch process. We need to access the SVG’s individually, and keep them in vector format, and display the exact fonts, distances and alignments.
That was a reply to my comment about using PDFs in preference.
Inkscape is still the best way to convert to/from SVG. It has a command line command for batch processing, and does have an option to convert text to curves.
(And indeed, it looks like CloudConvert is using the Inkscape engine.)
Hello Ben,
When looking at the contents of the SVG file from CloudConvert, it looks indeed like they are using Inkscape.
We’ll do a test on our machines with Inkscape. Thanks for the command line suggestion, I didn’t know it. I’ll let you know the results after the test.
Thanks to @dan_kreider and you for thinking with us!
That’s the problem. Export the slice as a PDF, not SVG. Then use Cloud Convert to convert it to SVG. It’ll work, I promise! I’ve done hundreds of these.
