Checking to see if this issue has improved at all in the last five years, and if there’s a way to work around this in Dorico 5 (which I have), or if not, in Dorico 6. In general, the advice to do all the manual layout work at the very end of a project is completely impracticable, and obviously compositions change even after a premiere.
I just discovered this problem as I tried to add a new flow to a piece I’m writing. I’ve consulted two of my colleagues about this today and only heard horror stories. One of them is currently trying to add a short passage into an otherwise finished orchestral work – standard fare in a composer’s work – but apparently, this is not possible to do without losing all the manual layout work in subsequent pages.
I’m still relatively new to Dorico, but if this is the case, it’s a deal-breaker.
The key is to do as much work using page templates or note and staff-attached rule-based adjustments (such as note-spacing, ratsral changes, or system breaks) that will move with the music rather than manual on-the-page fixes that can be thrown off when material is added or subtracted.
This is not a panacea, but it does make the revision process immeasurably easier.
I’m working on my first project on Dorico, and it’s a fairly simple score. Even then, there’s no way to make it look the way I want without manual adjustments. What I’ve learned today means that any and all time and energy spent manually editing a score will be lost if you ever plan to revise a finished piece. I don’t see how this is workable.
Of course one may need to make individual changes sometimes, but in general Dorico allows one to adjust staff and system separation by rule in the Layout options, which works well almost always for almost everyone.
Since you are just getting started with Dorico, it’s worth trying.
After consulting a number of my classical composer friends who are as desperate about this as I am, I find it pretty unrealistic that I’d somehow discover a unique set of layout options and rules that will make my score consistently look right. It’s an absurd idea that could even be possible with anything even slightly more complex.
After finishing this project on Dorico, I’ll go to back to Finale for as long as I can keep it alive. And then – no idea. Finale is a crappy piece of software, but for a contemporary classical composer, it’s at least usable. What is not reflected in this forum is that people in my particular field are desperate that there really is no software anymore that we can use. I guess we don’t count among the “almost everyone”.
I know this has been noted by those that are far more expert at Dorico than I, but I’ll just note that a) yes, it is a problem that manual edits don’t stick to the page, but b) it can also be confusing to understand exactly how Dorico deals with staff spacing. I simply did not get it for a long time but once I did, I realized that it solved just about all of my concerns.
Here’s what I did not understand: manual spacing is almost never needed because in those cases where one might expect to need it, the issue is solvable by resizing the frame on the page. If you’ve tried this and it doesn’t help, then you’re right: you’re stuck. But if you’ve tried haven’t, then do explore this to see if it solves the spacing issue.
Even if that does fix it, it still does not prevent having to readjust things if you later insert a page or do something that causes systems to reflow. But it is much faster to readjust frames than a whole bunch of individual staves.
As ever, if you can provide an example, then it’s possible that there may be a solution you’ve missed that someone else can suggest.
The point about Dorico is that you set the global options to cover the vast majority of cases, leaving you to make a few, small alterations for the exceptions that don’t fit. Overall, this should reduce the amount of work required.
Yes, this may include overrides to a page, which then is in the wrong place if your music reflows – but you can move page overrides to previous/next page in Engrave mode.
What I’ve found is that the way to operate in Dorico is to identify points in the document that will always start a new page.
Once such a point has been identified, the file should be split there, and a new dorico file should be created from that point on.
That way, whatever happens previously will never affect more music than until the next page break.
Then, you create separate PDFs from each file and put them together in InDesign. If any changes need to be made to the score in Dorico, one click will update the PDF in InDesign (if the filename has not changed).
Of course, if the score is a continuous piece 100 pages long without any natural page breaks, you’re out of luck.
No matter how many times this concept is repeated by the faithful, there remains a serious problem. I’ve posted about this in post no.37. We are all aware of the global options, but by their very nature, they are global, and one size does not fit all.
If you have a score with consistent instrumentation that you show on every page, that can work well with global settings.
If on the other hand you are working with big orchestral scores with one system per page and you don’t necessarily have all the instruments always showing, then you invariably have to manually adjust the staff spacing. For example, I like to have a bigger gap between the braced string group and the timpani or brass group that is directly above them, than the gap between the brass and the woodwind braced groups. I don’t always want for example, empty harp staves showing throughout the movement if it only plays on the last page. The hide empty staves is fantastic, and the ability to exclude instruments from this is also fantastic, but for the instruments that you do want to be hidden, in order to get a pleasing page balance afterwards, you have to manually adjust.
There’s simply no question that this is presently an impediment to the software, and we can only hope that some sort of freeze formatting option will arrive as soon as possible.
If this reply is directed to me then I’m afraid I can’t answer it because I’ve never used Finale. I came from Sibelius, and can’t honestly remember anything about that software except that things always got accidentally moved and I often didn’t notice!
In a way the point is irrelevant. Maybe it is not possible in those other programs either, but Dorico is the future and has been since its inception. Daniel has acknowledged that the behavior we’re discussing is not ideal so I guess we’re all venting a bit and I expect the wizards at Dorico HQ to come up with a solution. I do hate to complain to be honest, but I do feel that this is important because I want to see Dorico become the de facto standard for everyone who is serious about writing music. Film composers particularly (budding and pro) always need the ability to slot a new section in at any point in the score and not ruin their downstream formatting.
I’ll mention my earlier point about the Stop Bar for insert mode which we got to prevent downstream disasters. Maybe a similar concept could work for page formatting, or more likely a very clever solution that none of us ever thought up.
@Derrek I’m not one to defend Finale, but at least on Finale, your manual adjustments aren’t destroyed if you e.g. add a bit of music earlier on in the piece. Staff spacing is system specific, as are system margins. If your edits change the logic by which systems appear on a given page, that will obviously result in a mess because you’ll have to rethink the layout. But if not, they will work correctly even after being pushed forwards and backwards in the project. This means you can also try different options quickly and see what works and what doesn’t.
@Grainger2001 I’m working on something pretty simple on Dorico as my first (probably last) project, and it’s already a pain. I can’t imagine trying to create an orchestral score. Except if it’s a 100% finished piece in which the layout is already set in stone, and that I would never plan to revise or change in anyway.
Dorico probably works fine for editions of standard repertoire for this reason, and film music, wind bands, choral arrangements, educational work, musicals. I can’t see what else could explain the absurd piece of advice “just adjust the settings and everything will look right automatically”. This is not possible even in theory, and if that’s the logic Dorico will stick to, there’s no chance it will become a functional tool for contemporary classical composers at any point in the future.
Not sure if there’s any reason to be apologetic venting about this, either. Steinberg took an active role in ending Finale, indeed tried to hasten its obsolesence to capture a bit of market share. With it, we lost unimaginable amounts of people’s creative work and the culture around it. The fact that the replacement is unusable for many of us makes it pure vandalism.
So I’ll try to eke out another 6-7 years (I hope) out of Finale, freeze my laptop in time and hope it doesn’t physically die. When it finally does, I’ll need to revise my earlier works with Adobe products and hope that MuseScore is up to speed at that point.
This sounds as if you are blaming the people who are actually being the ones offering help to the stranded MakeMusic victims.
Let’s not rewrite history.
Hear, hear – let’s not. Anyone who was there for the initial messaging explaining how the death of Finale would be expedited knows exactly what kind of deal was struck behind the scenes. The outrage was so overwhelming that the two companies had to walk it back. Anyway, the same damage is happening regardless, just at a slower pace. (Which I’m grateful for, if that’s the right word – I’ll be stuck working with Finale until MuseScore becomes a professional-level engraving app.)
Having been fooled into giving money to Steinberg to replace a bad piece of software (Finale) with one that is quite simply unusable for my work (Dorico) really didn’t register as “help”.