Yes, there’s really a surprising amount of poor craftsmanship in the details. I guess what’s most compelling about those hymnals to me is the paper and binding. The ELCA in particular is just gorgeous… Without a doubt the most beautiful paper and layout I’ve ever seen in a hymnal.
In their defense, whatever software they used, it certainly wasn’t Dorico, which means most of these settings were likely not automatic and had to be checked in the editing process. That’s not an excuse for typos, but I do understand the difficulty. I don’t usually need to pay much attention to things like beam angles or dot placement, thankfully.
There are very few decisions that Dorico makes automatically that I can’t set globally. There certainly are a few, but they are infrequent enough that it’s easy to catch them. Finale was much more problematic in this respect. As a result, the handful of hymnals I did before switching to Dorico had a few of these sorts of errors: dot placement was a particular annoyance, since it had to be checked religiously.
It’s easy to be sharp in the editing process when there’s much less to check. When every note, slur, dot, and beam could be completely wrong, the weariness sets in…
My eye is not too much averse to this. It’s the only way to fly for this hymn.
I am doing my first hymnal, and your work will inform how I do mine. Currently, I am looking to have ‘service music’ in a separate project file from the hymns. I need to be able to adjust parameters in hundreds of hymns at once, but those parameters may not work for service music.
However, I am strongly considering your route of a separate project file for each and every hymn. For global parameter adjustments, I will need to explore better how the new library functionality works.
To be honest, it’s not that much work if something does have to be changed. Case in point, I made the choice to change some line and beam thickness. It was a little tedious, but it didn’t take me more than a couple hours to modify every single file. And what I gained was peace of mind regarding accidentally messing up massive files with lots of pages.
I have a large quantity of hymns engraved in Sibelius, and I’d like to switch to Dorico.
One challenge I’m having right now is stem direction. Ideally, for the SATB hymns, I’d like to keep the individual parts separate (e.g. so I can playback with a part emphasized if desired), but I want them to print in hymnal format – e.g. if I have a quarter note that is a C and G chord on the same clef, both stems point the same way. Dorico seems to force the stems to diverge, and I can’t figure out how to fix it.
Every musical notation software is difficult, and Dorico feels like a material improvement, but getting over the learning curve is a challenge.
What are you talking about is condensing. Dorico does condensing, but it doesn’t do very well with condensing vocal parts. But it is relatively easy to set up duplicate parts on layouts that are non-printing, and macros for bulk actions involving duplicating notes.
You do have to go beat by beat, yes. But making marquis or multi-selects and anssigning the notes to upstem voice one apart for disparate rhythms isn’t that painful; it just takes a minute or two per hymn. I do it regularly.
