Last summer I was developing a show together with a director using the first time in my life Dorico in such a big project (I’m finale refugee).
The problem was, that we changed the order of the songs (flows) during development and a lot of stuff I did in engrave mode - especially system breaks - didn’t move when I changed the order of the flows in setup-mode.
I recently tried it again and it seems, that this feature is still missing.
Please add this feature! Without it I have to do all the engrave-stuff once again if I change my mind and move flows what happens a lot during development.
Hi @masis82, I cannot confirm this: system breaks do move by reordering the flows:
Possibly you are speaking of manual Staff Spacing made in the Staff Spacing tool in Engrave mode?: this kind of override will be lost if the page where the system/stave with override lives, changes (as would be the case when switching flows).
If not, please provide a Dorico file that shows the issue, with a description of how to reproduce the undesired behaviour.
Sorry, you’re totally right. I’m talking about manual adjustments in engrave mode.
Look at this example: the layout is ridiculous but it shows the issue: move any flow in setup mode and the manual staff, system spacings won’t move. That happened a lot last summer in my show: after changing the order of the songs I had to redo all the manual stuff what was very tedious.
Yes, ideally all formatting should follow along but I suspect it wouldn’t be possible. After all, a flow doesn’t have to start a new page so a moved flow could in theory end up anywhere on a page so any connection to a page no longer makes any sense.
As you’ve been here a while, you have probably heard the standard recommendation to avoid manual adjustments when possible. System breaks and other formatting changes that are connected to the music does follow along when flows are re-ordered. So if you can get the result you want using the various options and those kinds of edits, re-ordering flows shouldn’t be a pain.
What have the circumstances been where you’ve had to do the manual adjustments that break? Maybe there are better ways to accomplish the same thing in a way that won’t break when things change?
As @Rikard writes, can you share just one page of the original score (or something similar), to see why you need all the spacing: so someone can suggest different strategies that don’t include manual staff spacing.
Thanks for all the replies! Very appreciated!
Unfortunately I can’t send anything of the score and it doesn’t make any sense as well because it’s not an issue with this particular score. I struggled - and I still do - to find settings, which fits for a whole project like this one. I write often for musical plays and shows and the differences between flows couldn’t be greater in these projects. Maybe I just need more practice and a deeper understanding for Dorico to get along without the requested feature.
You could recreate a couple of pages (for example in 2 different flows), with some random music and with the kind of items that you used (possibly text?) which need those different spacings. So we can help you with your struggle
I had a thought the other day and I’m interested to know what you think.
I do a lot of work that requires a piano/vocal score before the full orchestration.
Currently:
I have each chart as a separate flow
I use a different layout for each chart. So in the end there could be a dozen “piano/vocal” layouts.
… this somewhat avoids the page override situation.
My thought was to use one layout and put a page template change (to the First page) every 20 bars - or something sensible that my flows would never exceed.
This way, I could make changes to a flow’s pages and none of the pages in the following flows would be affected (as they wouldn’t begin until page 20/40/etc
However, one would still be stuck having to deal with overrides between each template change, if you know what I mean.
Besides having to set up the template with the necessary page template changes initially (e.g. adding 20 empty pages > a First page template change on page 21 > removing the empty page templates) can you think of any major downside?
Edit: I can still print each flow individually and the empty pages are not printed.
Intresting idea, @DanielMuzMurray. I am not sure I completely grasped what you have in mind (also because it’s time to go sleep for me…). If you would like to post an example Dorico project that shows with minimal amount of flows your concept, it would be interesting to explore this possibility. Thank you.
Now that I’ve tried to do it from scratch I can’t seem to get it working. I can’t remember the exact steps I took last week.
The problem I’m having is that even though I have a First page template change on page 21/41/etc, rather than starting each flow on those pages, each flow is continuing on from the previous one - which makes sense.
I don’t think there’s a way for Dorico to not start a new flow until the next First page template.
Anyway, someone gets the gist of what I’m trying to do…
exchange flow 2 and 3 and you immediately see what happens:
Page 7, 11, 12 - wrong vertical spacing causes collisions
You may delete flow 1 as well to reproduce the mess.
I understand and LOVE the automatism in Dorico so you save a lot of time by avoiding working on layout but I find in musical-scores - especially piano-vocal-scores - have a big variety of layout-concepts.
Left page: lot of underscore, no vocal-staff, squeezed to fit on one page for pageturn reasons. Right page: standard spacing with vocals.
So in this case I need to use the vertical-Spacing-tool in engrave mode to make this possible but I’m in the middle of the writing process. There will be tons of changes later therefore re-formating would be necessary (and very tedious) and - to be frank - I don’t really get why it shouldn’t be possible to implement the simple task: when moving pages move vertical spacing as well. That would make the re-order-feature so powerful!
Thanks for your thoughts but I didn’t really get the idea:
I opened your demo-project and filled it with tons of random content. No matter how many bars and pages I add - the first-page-layout will always stay on the first page of each flow (as expected, and not to bar 20, 40…). And anyways: how would this move manual formatting together with the related flow?
And what template change do you mean? I just find the usual First-Page and Standard-Page templates in engrave mode.
Sorry, maybe my english skills need some improvement…
I find, when I am scoring a musical, that I never use a single Dorico file initially. I don’t write songs in the order they appear in the musical; and of course, during the development process new songs replace earlier numbers.
Ultimately I may combine the numbers into a single score, and the process is not always easy, as sometimes the same instrument may not merge into the same part, and I have to combine the two versions manually. The question I face is when in the development process that combination makes sense.
I removed all staff spacing overrides and changed a couple of global setting to obtain a very similar result without red overrides (you can compare this file with the original using the Library Manager)
Try now to switch the flows
Dorico file: Moving Flows Demo-NO RED OVERRIDES.dorico (2.3 MB)
Now, for your second example:
No, probably you don’t need to use manual staff spacing: upload that two pages as Dorico file, and (probably) I can show you how to obtain that result without red overrides.
Just a thought (and coming late to the party): if you anticipate a lot of these shuffling requests, you might take the decision to start each flow on a new page, keep the flows in Dorico on the original place, and do the shuffling on the generated PDF output
It might not be a bad idea to arrange the atypical page as a custom page template. If the page moves, one can reassign the template to the new page instead of starting from scratch.
Thank you SO MUCH for re-doing my excerpt!
This is so helpful - particularly the compare-feature in the library-manager which
I didn’t explored yet! WOW!
I will use this for future work and better planning in advance!
One can arrange text fields and music fields to support unusual mixes of text and music which are then transportable should the page structure need to move in a subsequent revision.
