I sent a document with a good 350 pages of music engraving as a first draft to the client. They’ve now asked for two pages to be merged into one, even if it makes things a bit tighter. This happens on page 70. But all subsequent pages then suddenly fall out of the carefully arranged layout, and on pages 71 through 350 there’s suddenly chaos. Is this a bug or a feature? Am I doing something wrong?
All systems have both frame breaks and system breaks applied.
Manual staff spacings (done in Engrave mode>Staff Spacing tool) will be lost if the corresponding pages change number (ID). The suggestion is not to use manual staff spacing adjustment, if not at the very end of the layout process. Possibly there are better strategies to make your layout look good, without manual staff moving. (But to give suggestions we need to see the Dorico project,…even if it is very big for sure).
If you have page overrides, things can look also out of place, if the corresponding pages change. You can swap page overrides to previous or next page, though (from the Pages panel in Engrave mode: the two little arrows):
Other adjustment should not be affected by the two pages being merged.
The suggestion is not to use manual staff spacing adjustment, if not at the very end of the layout process. Possibly there are better strategies to make your layout look good, without manual staff moving.
Unfortunately, that’s not an option. I’m familiar with all the automated solutions and adjustment options Dorico offers. But in my eyes, they’re a nice support for smaller projects with simple music. However, as soon as things get even a little more complex, I switch off everything Dorico has to offer in terms of automation, simply to save time.
Back to my problem:
So as long as i change things befor page 71 and page 71 stays page 71, nothing changes. But as soon as page 71 becomes page 73, does that wreck all the manually corrections to the automatic status quo?
I doubt it will be solved without clever folks being able to look at the file.
All we can do is throw out (well intentioned and informed) guesses - which is a waste of everyone’s time.
It’s really a purely technical question: Does a manually set-up layout (adjusted staff spacing, primarily) remain intact if you add or remove a page in an existing project? Unfortunately, I can’t provide the project, since I’ve signed an NDA. I’m sorry for wasting your time with my question.
It’s not a purely technical question. I’m afraid the answer is “it depends…” (on many things that you may have done).
I’ve now tried it with a simple, newly created file. It’s quite obvious that it doesn’t actually depend on what I did. As soon as I change the page structure so that one more (or fewer) page is generated, it completely tears apart all the spacing corrections after the change. A design decision that I’m having a hard time understanding right now, to put it really, really politely.
Agree. It’s "broken by design”.
Seriously?
Most likely because of how you made those spacing corrections.
Hi, this will not save time, as you can’t really change things later (like adding or removing pages). By design, small manual adjustments should and can only be done, once the layout is completed.
In other softwares like Finale, you would do (and would have to do) these adjustments, while in creation mode, on the fly.
This approach does not work in Dorico - and it definitely doesn’t save time.
What I sometimes use, if the overall Layout options for a specific layout doesn’t match every
aspect: at Frame- or Systembreaks one can slightly change Rastral size. These changes will carry over after changes. Also manual Spacing Adjustments will stick to their original places.
And that’s exactly where the problem lies.
It’s incomprehensible to me why you can’t simply add or remove pages without issues. This isn’t some highly specific use case that occurs once every 100 years. So before I move on to fine-tuning, I’ll send my client a horrible-looking document with the words: “You’ll have to imagine this as if it looked good. We first need to check whether the page layout works this way. And after that, I’m not allowed to change it anymore.” Sorry, that’s simply ridiculous.
With mouse and keyboard. I moved the staves up and down in Engrave mode — what else would I have done?
This is the explanation:
In Dorico your layout is not linked to the music.
The layout is a seperate entity, which offers tremendous advantages, if one knows how to use it.
The music itself is a separate stream of data, which can be changed and modified at any point, without needing to respect a layout.
This has also great advantages.
Now as a user, one has to put these two things into one end product, with respecting the underlying concept.
A picture, it is like filling a soup into a container. You can change the recipe of the soup, the amount of its ingredients. You can change the container or soup bowl, into which you fill the soup. But at the end you will fill the soup into the bowl you choose.
Regarding your example: I would create a new additional layout, every time your customer wants changes. And please try to get rid of the Finale habit to do manual horizontal corrections to the staves while inputting the music.
Respectfully, I don’t think we can say whether manual staff spacing work was necessary in Hutmann’s case until we see a bit of the actual score. Could you perhaps show some screenshots with the content blurred?
I’ve never worked with Finale. Nor did I do any layout work while entering the music.
I received a document in which all the input had already been completed. My job was to divide up the pages and make the whole thing readable. This urgently required manual corrections. Among other things, precisely in the vertical fine-tuning of many staff lines. After I sent the results of my efforts to the publisher, the request came up to combine two pages into one, as I mentioned at the outset. A perfectly normal proofing process. And that’s exactly what causes the following pages to fall apart after this “serious intervention,” as far as the vertical fine-tuning of the staff lines is concerned. And I don’t really consider that an advantage.
But my problem has been identified, can’t be solved, and I don’t want to keep stealing anyone’s time here.
Thank you all for your input.
I would like to suggest a workaround.
Duplicate the layout.
In the new layout, compress page 70-71 into one page (or what was needed) and do the layout for that page. Use page 1 to 70 from this layout.
In the old layout, change the page numbering from page 72- to 71-. Use page 71 to 349 from this layout.
Export the needed pages from the two layouts selectively and merge the two resulting pdfs in a pdf editor.
Thanks, that’s a good tip. I’ll keep that in mind, even if it fragments the files a bit. But I’m already used to that from Dorico. No big deal.
Anyway - I also didn’t want to leave unmentioned that, in my view, the merging of systems, which results in the “loss” of a page (and is thus the cause of the layout crash in terms of manual line correction), has absolutely nothing to do with music entry, but solely with layout.
Yes, I can confirm this.
One has to keep in mind that Dorico produces the layout on the base of your individual layout settings.
If you then do manual overrides to those settings you basically tell Dorico, not to use the layout settings on that page. Dorico respects your choice by preventing that page to be changed.
There is not really a backdoor to get out of these choices.
The fact that music data and layout are independent doesn’t mean that there can be no automated solution to fixing this problem.
There could be a command to combine or split systems while preserving the layout changes.
It is true that a word processor would “recover” and remain the same after a page is removed (or added) from a document. Doric seems to have a different approach to layout. I personally am not fond of the “relative positioning”, which can cause problems, but I understand the design. It is, however, not great for true engravings where you want your items “in place” forever. Dorico sometimes “struggles” between composition/arranging and engraving. It tries to be good at both, and sometimes this results in less good situations.
Personally, I think that once the frame and the systems are locked, manual staff spacing should be attached to those frame/system locks.