Layout (trad.)

Dorico
#1

This is a question about the traditional meaning of layout, so that of a page, so not about a “layout” in Dorico.

I attached a screenshot of a part. I didn’t make any changes in Dorico’s Engraving section, but as you can see it doesn’t look quite as it should be.

Three months ago I exported this piece from Sibelius, and I’m pretty sure Sibelius made this mess, as it likes to do in general. Is there a “hard reset” of all the engraving changes in Dorico? I think in this particular case, it’s mostly a matter of unintended frame breaks. In Engraving mode I see a lot of frame breaks, but I didn’t put a single one of them there. As I mentioned already, Sibelius probably did.

Schermafbeelding 2020-08-03 om 21.21.58.png
Schermafbeelding 2020-08-03 om 21.21.58.png1272×1244 99.4 KB

#2

Show signposts. Select all frame and system breaks and delete them.

#3

When I do that, the whole piece (26 minutes of music) is on one line (I don’t know the proper english word for it: all music is on the first line of music, very, very, very condensed, not distinguishable). I want Dorico to decide where to put frame breaks. It does its job very good normally. I want to delete all Sibelius-induced engraving decisions and would like Dorico to make up its own mind. It’s very good at that, I find.

the problem is not only in this part, but in all parts. The orchestra is a large wind band. It would be very nice if I could perform a full factory engraving reset on every detail of this score as well as all of the parts. Let Dorico decide where to put (frame and system) breaks, is that possible?

#4

When Dan said “select all frame and system breaks”, he really did mean all. If all your music is squished onto one line, that indicates that there is a System Break at the very beginning of bar that is set to “Wait for next system break” (in the properties panel). If you untick that, Dorico will lay out your music according to its algorithms.

The alternative is to delete the existing part layouts (from the right panel of Setup mode), then create a new set (Setup menu > Create Default Part Layouts).

#5

Thanks, pianoleo!

It worked, but it takes a lot of time. If I have to do this for all parts, it will take me several hours. Also creating a title page for all parts is really a lot of work. In the dutch introduction to Dorico-session one of the tutors said: “if something takes a lot of time in Dorico, and you have the feeling that you are doing exactly the same a lot of times, you probably are doing something wrong.” I really hope this is the case now…

#6

The big question is why there’s a bunch of Frame and System Breaks in the first place. Dorico doesn’t typically add them unless you tell it to (either by manually adding them, or by Propagating Part Formatting from one layout to another).

#7

Roel, you can make keyboard shortcuts for anything which is filterable, in this case, system or frame breaks (or both). Select all is Cmd-A (on a Mac) and I have Cmd-F-S set to select all system breaks. I then press delete. This process takes 5 seconds at most, hardly several hours. In any case, Dorico doesn’t import system breaks so they must have been created another way, as Leo suggested.

Have you read up on Master Pages? They’re an essential part of learning to use Dorico well. Title pages and front matter can be made using them.