Hi Team, I’ve been using Sibelius for 20+ years and ready to make the change to Dorico (I tried with v1 of Dorico but that was a long time ago). I realise I will have a lot of ‘habits’ that I need to shift. I’ve been reading the documentation but have found a couple of challenges and have a few layout questions that have. I do a lot of worksheets so these are go to functions for me.
I’ve attached an image to help explain what I’m trying to achieve.
Offset Graphic at top of page: Looking to have the logo slightly offset from the Title. I tried in Engraving but just couldn’t get it to work.
Getting the 1st bar only without taking up the full line: I’m sure there an easy workaround for this one, but just finding my way around.
Have the gap between the bars: this really helps with the layout for worksheets and has a nice friendly look about it.
I’m pretty sure it can all be done with a page template(s) but a little too involved to try and explain here. I’d recommend the Musical Flashcards and Worksheets _ Discover Dorico video on their YouTube channel. He does some layouts very similar to what you are trying to do. There are some other videos on page templates (sometimes referred to as master pages in older videos).
This is one way of doing it (and is probably what I would do for this worksheet) - putting two music frames on the same page - one for the first column, the other for the second.
The image was moved up by decreasing top page margin since the graphic can’t be moved up into the margin, and then the title and music frames were moved down to leave a gap for the logo.
If you want to keep a whole bunch of these in the same Dorico file, I would probably use master pages to hold this layout and put each worksheet in a different flow and use the flow tokens instead of the project tokens for the headings, and set Dorico to use the “first” page master page layout for every new flow.
In the PDF your exercises are from left to right then top to bottom - not the opposite - and so two long music frames probably won’t suit. This is because the music will fill the first frame first.
You would need a music frame for each position of an exercise. This is relatively easy to do e.g. you can just copy/paste a frame once you have it set the way you like. (The first bar can just be the same copied music frame).
This would allow music to flow from left to right and top to bottom. It would also allow for identical margins.
(The tutorial mentioned a few posts above will help a lot)
Thank you for that. I like the margin change to get the logo offset from the title! Will have a go at the flows for the column spacing. Might be a bit confusing with the order of things for the different exercises as they would not be linear in the number order when I’m doing them and also with the rehearsal marks.
How did you get the rehearsal marks to stay in sequence between the two columns?
I ended up with them just being flat across the top. There was another suggestion here to decrease the top margin and adjust from there. So I’ll give that a shot.
OK. Might be a bit time consuming to do this for each number as I do a lot of these. I’ll keep searching for a quick way. My head is still stuck in Sibelius mode for the layout of things :).
The other way of doing it would be to make each individual score excerpt its own frame as @DanielMuzMurray said, then you might be able to have them go in the right order and the rehearsal numbers would be in sequence. The only thing is that you would have to be careful to get all of the frames aligned, while this alignment is a bit easier if there are two frames used as columns instead of each excerpt being its own frame.
I just watched the video and adding the coda made it super simple and quick without doing individual frames for each exercise (sometimes I’ll have 20+ ex’s per page).
I’m now trying to work out how to get the first bar to not stretch across the whole line. I do have a system break after the first line to force the exercises below it. Would I need to do the first bar in a new frame or would you know of a setting that I can use for this?
I’m in the Engrave Mode > Note Spacing. I can click on the large handle as in your image (which is blue) and it turns solid blue, but it’s not letting me drag or move at all. I’m sure we’re getting close :).
You have to use keyboard hotkeys to move it to the left - on Windows it is shift-alt-left arrow (or to move it by a smaller amount, shift-ctrl-alt-leftarrow). Not sure what the MacOS key combination is.
