I want to copy (Propagate) the Piano/Vocal part to the Piano/Conductor part. As you can see, the systems and margins are good, but none of the text frames are right. Does this have to do with the difference between “propagate part formatting” vs. “Copy layout” or something similar?
I imagine this is one of those situations I keep finding in Dorico where there are two ways to do things that feel synonymous but it turns out do two different things.
Anyway, I want all the text frame formatting from one part to be copied to every other part. How to do it?
Normally this is done using Page Templates. If the Layouts use the same page template, all the text frames will be the same (though the content may be specific to each part).
If you have been creating text frames directly in Engrave mode, there is no way to copy that to other parts.
In which case, both your parts should look the same if they are using the same page template.
(Perhaps upload the file so we can see how you’ve set it up)
Hi Janus, I see your point, but that didn’t solve it. I just went into the Piano/Vocal and changed MX to MA. Then propagated it to Piano/Cond and to Piano/Vocal (copy).
Still the same result. Any other ideas?
I agree about no need to use multiple frame chains on normal scores. In fact, I see no need for them on ANY scores. In fact, I don’t know what they are or do. A silly infrastructural innovation by Dorico (along with the whole Project / Flow nonsense) that complicates and does not reflect the way any copyists or composers that I know think or work.
I work exclusively on musicals in NYC (currently working on a Broadway bound musical, one of the first to be fully on Dorico), and no musical theatre copyists I know understand or like Dorico’s flow concept. We just treat each song as its own project, working from a self-made template. Maybe this will change down the road in a few years, but for right now it seems to be a big shift in our comprehension (speaking purely anecdotally).
There are certainly reasons why someone would use separate project files for something like a musical, but it’s also a good use case for flows.
A flow is just a subsection of a larger work. It could be a movement in a symphony, or a number from a musical, or a song in a cycle (as I indicated above). Some people have engraved things like exercise books, in which using different flows for each exercise make it easier to do the layout. I know the word “flow” is not one that’s common in musical contexts; I think it was chosen specifically for that reason – if Dorico had called them “movements”, then it might not occur to users that they could be used for something other than a distinct movement.
These indicate page overrides – you’ve made some frame-related edit directly to the page of a layout, which means that that layout will no longer respond to changes to the underlying template.
I suggest that you look at each layout, and for the ones with red triangles, right-click and remove all page overrides. This will revert all of your pages to the page template. If you don’t like the look, make edits to the template, not to the page, and they will be reflected in all pages which share that template.
I’ve downloaded your file, and (as usual) @Janus is right. Changing the First page templates music chain to MA restores the ability for Dorico to start “each flow” (as per Layout options>Page Setup>Flows) with “First” page template without the need to use a page template change.
If you’re not satisfied with the way the text tokens are set, modify them in the templates (once) and it will be set perfectly for all parts. The easy side of your project is that many things are Parts (they could be custom layouts or Score layouts, which have different template sets, and this requires to re-do a little bit the templates, especially if the size of the page changes).
Different musical chains can be very useful if you plan to add some footer or specific musical chunk as a side information to the musical work. I’ve used that in a contemporary opera to describe some instruments’ sounds (synths) or some percussive patterns.
Here’s your project file after I fixed the frame chain and removed overrides. Now I think the three layouts you were talking about all look the same – except for a couple of differences because they have some different gap settings in Layout Options. Hopefully this gets you closer to what you’re looking for.
(You can ignore the warning about the file coming from a new version of Dorico; I didn’t use any new features, so it’ll be just fine in an older version.)
Many of your templates in this file are not configured well as they aren’t taking advantage of the Constraint locks. See how your headings are flying off the page at this size?
Those Text Frames were obviously set at a certain page size, but because you didn’t set any constraints they won’t properly resize when you apply this template to a different page size. Generally I’ll either have 2 or 3 of the Constraints locked as in this header:
You typically do not want all 4 locked though as then the frame ends up being very specific to that particular page size. And obviously as Aaron already said, you definitely do not want any overrides (red triangles) in your templates!
