Pretty sure this is a major bug

Disabling a flow causes nearly all Note and Staff Spacing changes to be lost.


See the attached picture. I made four changes in Engrave Mode:

  1. Increased staff spacing
  2. Move a lyric
  3. Changed note spacing
  4. Changed a note head location (clicking on the square, then on the circle below)

After disabling and re-enabling the flow:

  1. Staff spacing is lost
  2. Lyric is still moved
  3. Not spacing is lost
  4. Individual note head location is preserved

The top half of the picture shows these 4 edits before it is disabled, and the bottom half shows after.
I discovered this after toggling 25 flows that I had finished engraving. :frowning:

Unfortunately I think I have led you a merry dance in my earlier attempts to help you manage this project, Evan, for which many sincere apologies.

It is actually intentional that layout and frame chain-specific edits to things like staff spacing are deleted when you detach a flow from a layout, because we can’t know whether or not you intend to re-attach that flow to the layout again later on, and if we didn’t clean it up at that point, it would remain there lurking, orphaned in the project forever.

I know that I advised you to do this because it helps to improve the speed of operation while working on projects with many flows. I wonder whether you might find it feasible to do all of the note input up-front without tweaking things in Engrave mode using the approach we outlined, i.e. of having only some of the flows in the layout at one time, and then bring all of the flows into the layout at the point at which you start doing the tweaking of the engraving. Hopefully you would find that these kinds of engraving operations do not suffer from the same slowness as note input in a project with many flows.

I think that the kind of project you are working on – with a small number of players/instruments and many, many short flows – might represent something of a pathological case for our application architecture. It would be very helpful if you could send me your project so we can take a look at it in more detail. Please email it to d dot spreadbury at steinberg dot de.

Daniel, no apology is necessary. This first project is a learning experience for me, and I expected to do a bit of stumbling around. Even so, I’m certain that the advice you gave me was still the right approach for this project, and it plays to Dorico’s strengths. I’d be happy to send you my project when I get home tonight.

Might you and your team consider rethinking what happens when you detach a flow from a layout?
The notes are also there, lurking and orphaned, but they are not deleted. Certain engraving changes (Frame, System, and Note Spacing markers, etc) are not deleted. Lyric and note head positions are retained. At present the logic does not seem to be applied consistently. In my estimation, deleting certain layout and frame edits doesn’t provide a benefit to the user. Instead, it seems to unnecessarily hobble the use of frames. Perhaps my project is a bit unique. Even so, I think it’s an attempt to use Dorico as Dorico is intended to be used. The concept of flows may be the single greatest innovation that Dorico brings to the world of notation software. Why make this concept less powerful?

I split my project of 350 flows into 4 separate projects - each containing no more than 100 flows (100 being the soft max based on the scroll bar weirdness). When all 100 flows are active, my system starts being a bit sluggish. I had hoped to work on 25 flows at a time. This worked fine until I came back to the first set of 25 and realized that most, but not all, of my engraving edits had disappeared. In the future, I’ll start with 25 at a time but leave each set active until I get to 100. If this proves too cumbersome, I’ll split my project into sets of 50. The only problem with that approach is that is becomes more difficult to maintain uniform layout and notation settings across multiple projects. Regardless, I’m still loving Dorico!

This is a variation on the theme above:

If a flow that has been fully engraved is imported into another project, most of the formatting is lost (note spacing and lyric positioning is lost; system breaks are retained). If this is intentional, please consider changing this so that formatting is retained.

+1

Found no way to delete this posting.

+1