I’m writing a song cycle, and each song has its own Flow. I made a new Master Page (called it Song Title) for the first page of each song. The original First Master Page is only for the first song, and not for the subsequent ones.
As I’m still in the process of composing it, I changed the order of the songs today. Because the songs are each a different length, by moving a Flow (aka song) to an earlier point in the composition, nudging the other Flows forward, the Song Title Master Pages are now on the page numbers they were originally, but which are now in the middle, or the like, of a song… not very useful. And the beginnings of each flow now have reverted to the wrong First Master Page.
Any way around this? What setting am I missing that can lock the Master Page changes I make to its respective Flow, and not to some page number.
What I do is to use the “First” Master for all the Flow first pages – Except the First! I have a special Master for Page 1.
So my Master “First Page Only” has Title, composer, lyricist, extra text, blah blah. No page number.
My “First” master page just has title and page number, with a slightly shorter music frame.
My Default master just has running heads and footers and page numbers.
Actually, that didn’t work. When I inserted a “First page only” Master Page on the first page of the score, it duplicated the first page. Removing overrides did not get rid of the doubled or original page either, the only way to get rid of the doubled page was a good old fashioned “undo”.
There isn’t a way of locking a master page change to the start of a specific flow: master pages are indeed locked to a page number. I don’t expect it will always stay this way forever, but it will be this way for a while.
I think we’d need to see a document to see exactly what went wrong: but what I described is what I do in all my documents.
“First” masters are applied to the first page of every flow.
I use a custom master for the first page – though in fact as it’s only needed for one page, you could just alter page 1 itself, rather than the master.
Ben, First pages are only automatically assigned in layouts where each flow is set to start on a new page.
In other circumstances you have to do that work yourself. As the Op’s discovered, this work doesn’t stick if you move flows around.
I don’t need to see a document to know what’s wrong - I’ve seen exactly this behaviour today in my own work.
Mountainmusic, keep persevering - you’ll get there!
I just laid out 39 flows in a couple of hours, using a combination of about four different master pages and a fair bit of tweaking - I reckon this is manageably quick, given each flow has four text frames at the front. If you’ve completely rearranged the order of the flows then maybe spend some time organising some custom master pages that you can bring in as necessary, and note that you may be quicker starting the layout process from scratch than trying to salvage.
Duplicated music means you’ve created a separate Frame chain from the rest of the pages. In the top left corner of the music frame, there’s a link chain link icon. Click on the drop down arrow and make sure that MA is selected.
