Not all parameters preserved in templates?

Hi everybody, first of all: great update!

I was experimenting a bit with templates and noticed that scores created from a template don’t look exactly as the original file that I saved as template.
Checking in the Library Manager against the original file reveals a considerable amount of settings not being carried over. Is that an intentional behaviour? If yes, what’s the reasoning for not carrying over custom “House Styles”?

Thanks,
Robin

Can you be specific about exactly what settings aren’t being preserved?

Actually a lot of them don’t:

Even things where I would expect them to be bare bones of what a template should carry over:

I wouldn’t want my time signatures bigger or centered in the bracket if I made a specific decision in the original file.

Perhaps you could send me both the template file, Robin, and also the userlibrary.xml file from your user application data folder. I wonder whether perhaps it’s not picking up user library changes, or something like that.

Robin sent me his template and I took a look at it. I’d forgotten (it’s quite a few months since we added this feature) that we reset the options to factory defaults when starting a new project based on a user-defined template. At the time the rationale was that starting a project from a user-defined template should be as similar as possible to starting from one of the factory templates, but clearly in retrospect that was the wrong decision, and we’ll address it in the first maintenance update.

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FWIW, I think the use case of keeping many factory settings does have merit, for the styling and such. I use factory most of the time, knowing you folks know more about style than I do. So since you already have that capability and you released the feature with it that way, you might include a checkbox “Reset settings to Factory Default (just keep instrument layout)” or some such, and just add in new functionality to include all settings if unchecked (basically a file save).

Would it be possible to have the window size setting saved as part of the Project Template?

Not easily, no, because that is not stored in the project template itself but rather in a separate file that Dorico maintains, keyed off the project filename with a separate entry for each window onto that project that you open.

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Adding a plea to allow users to define their own settings for templates. If I want the factory defaults, I’ll start a new document from factory. It takes me hours and hours of work to get the settings I want in Dorico – partly because I still don’t really know how it works, and partly because I need Dorico to do very specific things that are likely not what other users want or need— so when I finally get things right for my needs, it would be so much easier if I could just save my own template.

Please understand that it is utterly crushing to have worked to save a template, only to find that it doesn’t actually include the majority of the settings you have labored to create. “Save as” and deleting old content is a messy way to get these results.

Thank you.

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Daniel has already confirmed that the next update will change this behavior.

If you open your template from the file menu and select it from ‘new from project template’ drop down, I don’t think it imposes the same default settings. I did a comparison in the Library Manager between two identical files, one saved as a template in D4 (loaded from the file menu) against the original from 3.5. There are still a few differences, but I think they are all due to some of the new settings in D4 that were not there in 3.5. Everything else is intact.
I have found one other small anomaly with the Library Manager when comparing files - It has flagged a difference between settings that are actually displayed as the same.

I just tried it out in 4.0.10
It is much closer now but unfortunately it still does not preserve ALL parameters from the original file. Particularly Line Thickness parameters are not preserved (e.g. bar line thickness, sub bracket thickness etc.)

That really shouldn’t be the case. Dorico 4.0.10 is no longer applying any default options when starting a project based on a user-defined template. You’ll need to provide specific steps for me to reproduce the problem so I can look into it further.