macro for title pages

hi there - how can I record a sort of macro, which does something like
– master page change for page 1: title (custom cover set)
– master page change for page 2: first

how can I do this with the push of one button? can I do this once globally for 30+ orchestral parts?

I tried recording a “macro” but that only got me as far as opening the dialogue box, I still had to select “title” and “First”…

thoughts? thank you!

any thoughts?

Your signature doesn’t say what OS. On windows I know of a couple macro creating programs in which you can log all sorts of actions, including mouse clicks.

The other option would be to see if you can use keyboard commands like Tab, arrows, and to get where you want. If so, auto hotkey would work easily for that.

I’m on a Mac running High Sierra. I don’t think I can tab over to these changes (maybe Daniel Spreadbury would know), have to use mouse to get the cursor to the right panel, select a page and right-click “insert master page change”.

You can make a keyboard shortcut for Insert Master Page Change.
With Keyboard Maestro (which is macOS’s answer to AutoHotKey) you can do clever stuff whereby you give it a screenshot of the “page 1” icon and tell it to look for it on screen. When it finds it you can then tell it to click on that, thus automatically selecting the correct page.

In future we intend to extend the Propagate Part Formatting feature to optionally include master page changes, which would make this a lot faster. It’s complicated, however, because different parts have different numbers of pages, and if you were to copy the part formatting from a part with, say, six pages with a master page change on the fifth page to a part with only four pages, copying the layout from the first to the second would cause the destination part to end up with five pages. This may not always be what you want, so you would still have to eyeball every part layout to make sure it looks the way you expect.

Right on, thanks Daniel! All I really want to do is add title pages to orchestral parts – which necessitates adding two master page changes. It’s not too time consuming, but it would be nice to do with one keystroke. Thank you!

(and if there was a way to select Master Pages via keyboard instead of mouse, maybe we could record a keystroke macro to make that happen)

I’d speculate that, given you can have differently named custom master pages in each project, this won’t happen until we can save master pages as default. This is how paragraph (font) styles work - you can’t define shortcuts for them until you’ve saved them as default.

I imagine that you could set up a macro with keyboard maestro to do what you want. KBM can look for specific buttons on screen; click at specific points, etc. You’d have to do legwork to program what you want, but it should be possible to execute.

Is there an echo in here? :stuck_out_tongue:

Whoops. You’re right, Leo. I skimmed this a few days ago and then took a peak to see what was new this morning but missed your original post.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. lol :laughing: