After reading some reviews and watching some videos I installed Dorico SE 3.5 today to get some hands-on feeling about the Dorico way of notation.
To be able to quickly play some with Players, Flows and Layouts I opened the Coldplay Clock project, made a new layout, added the player ‘Voice’ to it and switched to the ‘Write’ tab.
Two things surprised me.
Lyrics collide in some places. It looks like words collide under grace notes, but also on other places (last note measure#15) . Lyrics also collide with Copyright notice on the bottom of the page.
On the score the writers of the piece are give equal importance, on the voice part 2 of them get a bigger font than the other 2, and the position and alignment of the text was a bit unexpected.
I was not able to resolve the lyrics collisions. I could change the position, alignment and fontsize of the writers (which I believe are seperated as composers and lyricists), but couldn’t find the dialogue to make that default.
Is avoiding lyrics collision part of the ‘Engraving’ tab, and thus only available on the Pro version?
And is the Pro version also needed for default placement and styling of composers etc. ?
Or is the problem just a newbie who didn’t find the correct dialogues to adjust these things?
The 14-16 collisions in verse 2 seem odd, and I’m not sure why it’s doing it. The collision at 26-29 is unfortunately not uncommon. In Layout Options, you can increase the Music Frame bottom margin to help with this using only SE functionality. It doesn’t fix the fact that the copyright info doesn’t fit into the given frame, but it does fix the lyric collision.
When you create a new layout, Dorico uses whatever the saved Layout Option defaults are (and whatever default master pages are in the project). These won’t necessarily be the same Layout Options or Master Pages that are used by the existing Layouts in the project.
The “Clocks” example project is a pretty old one by now, created as it was in a very early version of Dorico 1.something. Some of the weirdness is due to the immaturity of the version of Dorico that was used to create it, but the issue with collisions between lyrics on grace notes and on the rhythmic notes that follow them is the same in any project.
Ton, if you want to explore the full features of Dorico Pro, you can do so for 30 days by adding a trial activation code in eLicenser Control Center. You don’t need to download anything else, as Dorico SE and Dorico Pro are the same application, with different features enabled and disabled by the type of license you hold. If you have trouble getting hold of an activation code, let me know and I can send you one.
OK, I’ll look on the lyrics further then from a blank sheet, so I won’t inherit old limitations.
Thanks, I probably do that at a later time. At the moment I don’t want to waste a big part of those 30 days by learning the basics I can probably already do with SE, so when I eventually enter the trial period I van concentrate on exploring the advanced stuff
Am I correct in assuming to alter these default master pages a Pro version is needed?
And the position of the display of the different fields from project info are defined on such master pages?
Thanks, I was able to avoid the lyrics collision on the bottom of the page by increasing bottom margin, and to see the copyright notice didn’t fit the allowed space
To alter the default master pages, yes, you’d need a Pro license.
Having looked at “Clocks” it seems that the Default Full Score Master Page Set has been set up correctly to account for the long copyright details etc. The Default Part Master Page Set has not, and it’s this set that your new part layout will be using. If you add a new Score layout to the project, it’ll use the Default Full Score Master Page Set and will have enough room for the copyright. For that matter, you could add a new Part Layout, then go into Layout Options and tell it to use the Default Full Score master pages. You can do this in Elements/SE.
