Inline, indented Flow Headings?

Not so much a feature request, more an idea for when the dev team gets bored somewhere in the far future. There are more pressing matters.
It would be cool to be able to make Flow Headings that don’t take up vertical space, but rather change the indentation of the system they’re attached to. I made the screenshotted example by using System Text, collision avoidance off & moving everything by hand. That sure got tedious after doing 24 orchestral parts like this with 8 flows each, though. And I really needed every mm of vertical space I could get so the regular Flow Headings were never an option.

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Also very common in books full of (numbered) etudes, exercises, short songs… E.g. the very first hit when I search for ‘cello etudes’ on IMSLP.

This would be a lovely addition. There are organ editions that do this too; especially large compilations where there is a large “No. 8” with the title in smaller letters beneath it.

By the way: what font did you use for that mockup? I quite like it.

I suppose, if one was determined enough, you could have a “new” instrument for each flow and rename the instrument name as the flow header just as you want it. This would be a fair amount of effort however.

You can work round this for a solo piece by adding a divisi at the start each flow and changing the engraving options to get rid of the text you don’t want.

You have to pretend the solo player is a section player to be able to use divisi of course, but that doesn’t have any effect on the score formatting.

That idea should work for the parts, but it will make a mess of the full score.

Alegreya and Alegreya Sans SC :slight_smile:

Anyone know if there is are any updates on this potential feature?

This is a very important feature to me. divisi hack does not work for me for piano.

No, as yet we have not done any work on this, but it is something we would like to support in future.

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Along these same lines and similar to other threads dealing with the aspect that Dorico can only specify flow indents by project, not according to each flow, I would like to put out another scenario: In baroque music and/or opera there are frequently situations where an alternate version or ossia set of measures are tagged on to the end of a score and parts which can be “pasted” over the status quo version in the parts. Naturally, Dorico’s “Flows” are a great tool for multiple appendix options, yet the inserts would need to be without indent, which cannot be done without turning off indents for the entire project and then manually indenting ALL of the other flows/movements manually which, as a user on another thread noted, is incredibly tedious.

Might there be some consideration to 1) add an option in engrave mode to edit the indent feature on each flow frame, or 2) perhaps move the main preference from Layout Options to Notation options as those options can be set specific to each flow? The best solution in my opinion would be if the option was in Layout options “Apply to all flows; Apply to Flow 1 only; Apply to specific flows” or something similar, but I’m not sure how that would work from a programming perspective, and maybe there’s another solution that’s even better.

Whatever the case, I hope we see some movement on this sooner than later. Fortunately, my current project is one movement with one appendix and only for string orch and continuo. I can’t imagine having to manage this for a full orchestra.

While there is no feature as of yet, another way that is still a hack, but not as difficult, and certainly quicker, is to set all flow heading be left-justified and to set their vertical alignment to “bottom” (this is done in engrave mode and clicking the “Frame” icon. Then one has to set the marings of the flow to zero on top and zero on the bottom. Additionally, in Layout options “Staves and System”, we need to triple the value of the first system indent.

At that point, the headers are still above the staff, but in Engrave mode (again after clicking on the Frame icon) one can then line-up the bottom of the frame (dragging the bottom centre handle) to the lowest staff line.

Note that since this means that almost every page will show an override, it is best to do this after basic formatting is completed. It has to be done in all parts, but dragging the handle is the only thing left to be executed in every flow of every layout. I believe this is far less arduous, but I could be wrong!

You can remove the indent on any system with a Coda, setting the Gap width to a negative value.
Screenshot