I am a member of the Lutheran Missal Project, and I am using Dorico to produce a document with simplified versions of the Proper chants in English in modern notation. (Unfortunately, full-length Gregorian Propers in Latin, while they were retained in the Lutheran tradition, are not politically or acoustically viable in the majority of American Lutheran churches.) The structure of the document is one page per occasion, and each chant gets its own flow. The problem is that some of these chants are repeated on several occasions, particularly in the Sanctoral cycle.
I am trying to construct a Page Template that is used for each occasion that pulls the required flows for that occasion—it has one MA frame on it. I have to unlink that frame from the MA frame chain in order to select the required flows. But when I do that, my flow headings disappear. It seems to me that this is not the best solution.
Is there a set of best practices to follow that will allow me to use individual flows repeatedly in my layout?
Hi @Coranglais16, if you open a Project Template, you will see that the Music Frame Chain is a M type one (Master). There you can filter for the necessary flows, no unlinking necessary.
The best would be to create a new page template, then drag music frame in it, it will be also an M type one (with a different second letter): there you can also filter for the desired flows, without changing your MA music frame chain (which will remain untouched for the First and Default page templates). You can create as many page templates as necessary, each one with a new Mx music frame chain, which will remain independent from the others.
Depending on your needs, you can alternatively create new layouts, it would be easier… You could then use the Layout Name to indicate for which occasion the visualised collection of flows is, and with a Custom page Template, substitute the Project Title with the Layout Name token.
Can you share an example of what your project looks like?
possibility Using one separate layout for each occasion (I made two occasions: “March” and “September”), and filtering the needed flows for that layout). Creating a Page template to visualise the layout name as title.
Here the two layouts used:
possibility Using one layout for all occasions (I made two occasions: “March” and “September”), creating for each occasion a page template (that needs to be inserted in the desired page).
Here the used layout:
Many thanks for your suggestions and example file, which I will plow through. I’ve been a Dorico fan since the very beginning, and still the interactions between the various template and layout types confuses me particularly in writing.
This is probably going to be the most viable solution for me. I’ll have a list of 400-odd layouts (definitely a con), and printing/exporting a PDF of the entire collection will require combining everything after the fact in a PDF editor (another con), but the flows will propagate and any changes will update globally.
I suppose an ideal solution for me would be a feature whereby you can “link” one flow to another such that it can appear in multiple places as needed in the frame chain, but linked flows would always remain identical. This would be similar to what you could do with Finale’s Mirror Tool in the bad old days. Then I’d have one layout for the entire collection, and all repeated Proper chants would be linked to each other and appear in situ.
