The biggest thing, I think, is that I usually need to print a rejigged flow in every layout, where it’s on a different range of pages.
A related question (I hope) - and something that perhaps can be added later…
In Print Mode, is there a way to see how many pages are in the current flow? I’m working on a kind of confusing project (and I’m sure I’m not using Dorico as efficiently as possible), and often I have to print a page range. But if I want to print the last flow (say), I have to count the pages (by scrolling the part), then input the range.
Probably the best thing is to just skip over to Layout or Write (in page view) and look there, first, right?
Jim
Yes, for the time being I think that is best. There are tokens for the number of pages in a flow, though you still have to put that token into a text frame to see its value.
Hey Daniel,
I do a lot of work in both Broadway and film scoring. The lack of ability to print flows is probably the one excuse left that composers have to finally drop Finale and move to a modern program. Having an entire show in one file is so valuable to a composer’s workflow that you’d quickly start seeing a lot more converts to Dorico if they could just print individual flows.
In the production process there’s always a lot of very quick edits and reprints, and no one is going to go through the cumbersome process of figuring out the page ranges every time to reprint. I can’t overstate how valuable this feature would be.
Welcome to the forum, Josh, and thanks for the feedback. I can certainly see the utility of this, but if we were to implement this, please note that if you have a flow that starts or ends on the same page as music from another flow, or indeed if you have very short flows for play-ons/play-offs etc. on the same page, then the maximum granularity that it would be possible for Dorico to print would be pages, rather than flows: i.e. you might ask it to print flow 10, but if the end of flow 9 is on the same page as the start of flow 10, it’s going to print that too.
Forgive me while I enjoy the irony of Finale users digging their heels in at the prospect of a cumbersome workaround…
I would really love the ability to print flows. But with Finale I have a different file for each cue (or set of cues) and with Dorico I could have exactly the same - use separate files and not flows.
My use cases:
- Sending a score of a flow to someone for approval or input, during the prep process.
- Replacing every part for a flow because it has been rewritten in some way.
For either of these I would be perfectly happy with Dorico working at page level even if that meant the end of the previous flow or the beginning of the next. Easy to cross stuff out. Maybe Dorico could retain the layout but whitespace the previous and following flow?
It would be perfect if we could “Solo” a flow in the setup page and from that point on all you see and print is the soloed flow.
Thanks for the welcome!
I’m wondering though why it has to be this way… In the background, especially since these files are so small, couldn’t Dorico just make a copy of the document and delete a handful of flows, and print as if the user had done that themselves?
You’d lose any and all tweaks you’d made to system formatting, edits in Engrave mode, and so on. It wouldn’t be any good.
How about printing single flows regardless of page breaks and whatever, and let the user take care of the formatting (i. e. let the flow begin at the start of a page)?
What I mean is, if a flow begins right after the previous flow, halfway down the page, and continue to the next half page, have it print that way (possibly by just hiding the previous and possible next flow during printing); if the user wants the flow on one page only, they’ll have to do this with manual formatting. Does that sound feasible?
No, hiding part of the next or previous flow isn’t especially feasible, unfortunately. Of course it could be done (everything can be done, given sufficient time, money and willpower) but it would be difficult to achieve, as I’ve already outlined in previous posts in this thread.
As I said, I’d be happy with extraneous music before/after. It would still save a lot of time rather than going through each layout and finding the right pages.
Maybe, just an option to select the flow, in the print menu could solve this.
Where we choose now the pages to print, we could choose the flow, and the app finds the right pages for us.
This would reduce a lot of tedious job.
I think you’re missing the point of the discussion surrounding this request. What would the page formatting look like??
I hope we’re not misunderstanding each other: what I meant by “hiding” a previous flow is that it would certainly still exist in the flow of the document but it would just not be printed; i. e. the user would get a half-empty page with only the selected flow being printed from the middle of the page onwards. I don’t know how to explain it better. I just wanted to clarify.
Perhaps Daniel has understood, and his answer reflects that understanding?
The beauty of Dorico is the separation of Flows and Layouts. A Flow exists on a page only in the context of a Layout. A Layout is what gets printed. To create, on-the-fly, a revised page layout that only shows one Flow and hides any others (while keeping their positions) is clearly a non-trivial task.
Also, you can’t just ‘print a flow’, because a Flow has to be in a Layout; and it’s only a part of the layout.
The only likely option is to print pages that contain the specified flow, which would include any other flows that fall on those pages. Even that may be difficult to implement, as conceivably, a Flow could be on non-consecutive pages.
That pins down what would be useful to me: print all pages in the selected parts that contain any part of the flow.
If Dorico could do this calculation it would be the difference between selecting and printing or taking half-an-hour (with something like orchestral parts) to find the right pages everywhere. In a session this is a massive difference, which at the moment requires pre-splitting the file into separate files for each flow.
Hi Daniel,
Forgive my ignorance, maybe I’ll understand better with a concrete example.
Let’s say you have a classic three movement piece in three separate flows. And you decide that the second movement isn’t cutting it, so you go into setup, and just delete the whole flow. How does that mess everything else up? It doesn’t right? Movements 1/3 are just next to each other now.
So if I wanted to print just movement 1 and 3, that would be a way to do it, I’d just lose movement 2 right? So then it follows that Dorico could just do that in a temporary copy of the whole layout behind the scenes and the user wouldn’t actually have to delete the flow.
Or honestly here’s a much simpler solution. When you go to print a flow, a popover appears that says:
“Flows can only be printed when ‘Always start new page’ is enabled for New Flows. Do you want to enable that feature now?”
That would solve all the formatting issues right?