I am notating a musical which has 30 flows, and a text frame beneath the title of each flow. I have allow multiple flows on each page. I am not understanding how to set it up best so that everything doesn’t go awry as the music and text changes, which is going to happen continually.
At present I make a change somewhere and everything slips on top of everything else. I understand that there is a kind of work around regarding the text frames, by attaching them to a note rather than to the page. Is that still the best method with Dorcio 4? Has this changed perhaps with Dorico 5 (can’t use that yet unfortunately!).
Should I abandon having multiple flows on one page? I know layout would probably be best done after the work is finished, but that can’t happen with this, which will be workshopped.
One other option you might try would be to put the text (if it simple and consistent enough) into each flow’s Other Information box in Project Info and then add room and the token for it in a custom Flow Heading.
Then at least the text would move with mthe flow headings. Of course the same would happen if one attached SHIFT + X or System Text to the first note of each flow as you mention.
Do you really need the text above each flow to be in a text frame? If you don’t need special formatting, you might find that simply adding a text item above the first system of each flow is going to work more reliably, since Dorico will automatically add space for the text without you needing to intervene.
Been requesting a better handling of those kind of situations for ages ; I think it would be awesome to have a continuous flow handling like in any text editor so that edits would automatically shift everything rather than having to carefully think everything through before and having no possibility to improvise or make mistakes without redoing all the layout.
What would be awesome is upon creating a new file, having the option to choose between “continous” and the current workflow.
For instance we could work on a per flow basis and everything done in the layout of a flow would automatically shift when adding text/images/score, and we could finally swap flows (not being able to do that is annoying as hell when you make educational material and use flows as chapters as swapping flows just swaps the score content and not the flows themselves with custom edits in the layout).
Maybe someday…