Following the recent trend to remove the words “master” and “slave” from the dictionary, InDesign has just renamed “master pages” as “parent pages”. I expect this to soon happen in every program.
It is however to be noted that “master pages” have nothing to do with the definition of “owner of slaves”. They come from the Italian “pagina mastro”, where “mastro” is not an “owner of slaves”, but the “maestro”, the “leader” of the printing shop to whom’s indications the “followers” had to be inspired. A “pagina mastro” is a set of examples for the other pages.
I wonder if “Mastro Pages” couldn’t be used in Dorico, instead. More classical, more linked to our profession, possibly not offensive for anybody.
I understand why mastro could be interesting in a historic way. Not the “cancel culture” way
Are we going to change the rhythm names of the notes to make sure we offend no blacks, no whites, no overweight people?
If the decision does come to change, it will probably come from the very top (Yamaha). Big corporations will do what they want, and users will fall in line.
I worked in InDesign last night and early this morning. I saw “parent pages,” rolled my eyes, and moved on. I’m bothered by what’s driving these changes, but again, there’s nothing for it.
I do note that the scripting and code and such isn’t changing. Apparently coders are above such platitudes.
Steinberg is making efforts to try to avoid discriminatory and prejudicial language in its software. We are working towards removing the use of terms like “whitelist” and “blacklist”, “master” and “slave”. We already use terms like “allowed list” and “blocked list”, and in Dorico 4 we will be renaming “master pages” to “page templates”.
I agree, and in fact “like templates” been part of the explanation/description of the function in Dorico for a long time. I think this is a change that will additionally be helpful for Dorico users who aren’t familiar with this sort of page formatting functionality (just as I wasn’t when I first started using Dorico).
