Print flows

When in printing mode, the only option I see for printing selections of the project is to define a range of pages. It would be great if you could choose which flow(s) should be printed instead of finding out which pages need to be printed.

I would suggest you create another layout that contains only the flow(s) you want to print, perhaps.

Thank you, Daniel. I came up with that idea, too. It works, but gets complicated if the project contains many flows.

As I often work on larger cycles that consist of 12 or more pieces (flows), it will be a bit difficult to create special layouts when I only want to print out one or several pieces of a project. So, if you can see the usefulness of such a feature, it would be great if you could plan to integrate a “flow selection pane” in Print Mode.

By creating another layout that contains only the flows I want to print, do you mean I should uncheck those flows in Setup Mode? If so: this causes a major problem, since it will delete everything from that flow. Maybe you meant something else, Daniel?

This is what such a layout might look like. (Sorry about the misspelling of flow.)

Thank you, Derrek, for clarifying this. I still haven’t gotten the concept of layouts, despite having read the help documents. Hopefully a manual with clear examples will teach me how to properly use this feature in the near future.

I definitely got Daniel’s suggestion wrong and did not create another layout. :blush:

I’m still learning (experimenting with) layouts and other aspects of the program to learn what isn’t in the help files, just based on what I read here and elsewhere or saw in the videos. Good luck with your progress.

It might help to start with an over-simplified version of how the concepts fit together.

  • A player is a person who plays an instrument.
  • A flow is some music notation that can be played by a group of players, all playing together.
  • A layout is a piece of sheet music that contains one or more flows, joined “end to end” (i.e. the music in each flows is played sequentially, not simultaneously), and formatted onto the pages of a document together with titles, page numbers, etc, etc.
  • A project in Dorico can contain several layouts (e.g. a full score and a set of parts), and each flow can be included in more than one layout.

There are some extra features you can add to those basic ideas:

  • A player might be able to play several instruments, one at a time (e.g. flute/piccolo)
  • In a layout, you can select which players from the flow(s) should be included - for example, a full score layout will probably include all the players in each flow, but each part layout will only include one player.

That might help you get started understanding how the pieces fit together! For example if you delete a flow, that means you delete all the music in it, because the only place “music notation” can exist in Dorico is inside a flow. But you can have a flow that isn’t used in any layouts, or a player who isn’t used in any flows - presumably they will be used eventually, or you might decide you don’t need them at all and just delete them from the project.

Part of the confusion might be because when you start a new project in Dorico, you get all these concepts created and linked together automatically. For example, you automatically get a layout for a full score and a layout for each part, each of which contain all the flows in the project, and with the correct player selected for each part layout. That means you can “get started” quickly without really understanding what’s going on, but if you want to do something more complicated than use the default structure for a project, you have to learn how the pieces fit together.

Hi Rob, thank you very much for taking the time to explain the concepts in such detail! :slight_smile:

Is there (likely to be) a solution to print a single flow?
A new layout is not an option because (afaicwo) I would need to create a new layout for every instrumental part.

There is not currently a good way to print only a single flow, except to work out which pages it is on, and then specify those pages as the page range.

I would also like an option to print/export specific flows from a project, including naming the exported PDFs accordingly. For example, for organizational purposes I’ve decided to create a “book” of songs, i. e. collect all songs of a band in one project (the “band” project) with each song being a flow, and now I just want to export a certain song (flow) as PDF. Selecting a range of pages works, although it’s a little clumsy, but the files are exported with the project name and I also have to rename them manually. It would be awesome if this could be automated: export flows as PDF with flow names as file names.

This is quite a major one for an entire theatre piece in one file. When 39bb is edited I need to print just that. Working out the page numbers in every part in onerous. Flows are a game changer…just a few things like this to iron out.

I can understand how printing corrections for both parts and score in a musical can be an important capability.
Would exporting the flows and then printing the export work, or would that entail too much reformatting?

Hi Derek, that’s what I’ve done with one that would have been a lot of work to specify pages for every part. I still hit a few problems with page numbering and stuff. I’m sure print flows will come - it seems obvious functionality.

I would also love a ‘Print Flows’ option. I have a project with 60 flows and 9 layouts. I had to transpose one of the flows to accommodate a singer. Printing that single flow was tedious. Recreating a new layout or finding page ranges (I chose to do ranges) is tedious to do 9 times. Not to mention the file names match the original exports (PDF). I had to export to a new folder, rename and move back to the otiginal folder. Love Dorico, and I’d love to see print flows included in a future update. On a side note, exporting specific flows as audio was implemented in the last update and is a game changer for me. I was surprised ‘print flow’ wasn’t a thing. I hope it’s on the list.

The problem I guess is that a Flow doesn’t have to start a page. What does Dorico do then? Construct a new Layout on the fly?

I think that’s the nub of why it doesn’t exist already. Easy if flows are on new pages, otherwise Dorico should maybe have a dialogue with options to print everything on the page before that flow too, or else to re-lay it. I can see the trouble in that…

Good points. I see the difficulty. I’m sure whatever they come up with (assuming this is something of interest to users, and the team wants to address it) will be awesome!!

We have talked about this. The forthcoming update improves support for page ranges, allowing you to specify multiple ranges of pages to be printed. The next step would be for us to make it easier for you to define the appropriate page ranges to print based on which flows you want to print, though as Ben rightly says, you would have to deal with the fact that you might have bits and pieces of other flows at the boundaries of the flows you want to print – it would only be able to print a subset of pages from the layout, and wouldn’t remove raggedy bits of other flows.