I’ve been watching a couple of the Dorico videos, and I see that you can put a second flow on the end of another flow’s page using the Engrave mode. To support the flowTitle and so on, the proposal I’ve heard is that you should eventually use a flow2Title token. Is this going to generalise, so we need flow8Title if we’re doing something like a set of exercises?
I think it could get quite difficult to get the right layouts if we work only on a page basis, and something changes (perhaps a new flow or extra music) which pushes all the flows forward a page. I have in my head a concept of how flows work which is surely wrong, but is much more like a word processor - the flows are laid out in sequence using a page template. In which case, it seems to me that there’s a level of templating missing, between the generic page layouts, and the music boxes themselves, which would allow you to position frames at the start of a flow wherever it occurs in a page, and to set up frames between flows that would also move with the flows if they had to change pages. I guess in this conception, you have generic layouts for page numbers and other things that don’t change from page to page, then flow layouts, which would have flowTitle, flowComposer and so on. In that sense, you could have a vertical view as well, which would simply stack frames as long as they need to be to contain each flow or the other frames attached to that flow.
Flows do work just like they do in a word processor, but there is indeed a limitation at present, which is that Dorico cannot automatically insert title, composer and other front matter automatically for new flows starting in the middle of a page. It is definitely planned that it should be able to do this in the future, but it’s not something that will be happening imminently, which does mean that the only kinds of situations that can be handled completely automatically at present are those in which new flows always start on new pages.
Well, pianoleo, I think I first read about that in November or December… So it is not really new that we know that, in due time, we will be able to have different flows with their title on the same page
Marc, I was evidently unspecific about what was new information - sorry!
Just on Saturday:
And on Sunday:
This, to me, looks like an overnight change of heart.
I realise that, out of context, the two quotes I’ve listed look like completely different topics. From my point of view, it’s all one big topic, though I realise I may be misinterpreting it as such.
No, it’s not at all a change of heart: it has always been the plan that Dorico should be able to handle the display of flow titles etc. for multiple flows on a page automatically, but it’s complicated and we have not yet implemented it. That is not in conflict with the design that page overrides etc. are independent of the musical content of the frames, which will still be true once we have implemented proper support for what we internally call “flow breaks”.
Well I’m really genuinely sorry for battling over the past week, in that case - actually, I’d be sorry regardless of this, as I’ve been unnecessarily terse with various people and that’s not ok. Dorico is already a wonderful improvement over the competition, and we have a pretty good community spirit here that all of us should uphold.
In my niche circumstances, flow breaks would, I think, obviate the need for overrides.
I use a workaround to get flow titles into position for parts where you need multiple flows on a page for the parts but not necessarily for the score. I create the flow title as a system text linked to the very beginning of each flow in the full score. The titles then appear in each of the parts at the head of each flow and can be sized, positioned and spaced using the usual controls. This can be quite time consuming if the number of parts is high but it is still much, much simpler than creating extra text frames in each part for movement headings. Hopefully this will become obsolete when the automatic generation of flow titles for multiple flows on a page arrives.
Any news on this? I have the Elements version of Dorico, so no possibility to work with frames (which is OK, as I do accept the limitations comming with this version), however having a title separating flows at the middle of a page (automatically) is something that would be really useful… I’m working on Christmas carols right now - lots of short flows, having it every time on a separate page is not very convinient…
Yes, this is certainly planned for the future. Dorico Elements would not have the full set of editing possibilities that Dorico Pro will provide, but when this feature comes to Dorico, it will be possible in Dorico Elements to determine whether to have flows starting midway down the same page and whether or not to use flow headings at the start of each flow.
