We are making the long-awaited transition from Sibelius to Dorico, and are getting to grips with opening projects sent from other composers for orchestrating and engraving. After spending a couple of hours going through the (many!) options for notation and layout, we have saved our preferences as ‘Default’ and are trying to apply it to another score. We have run into an issue:
When trying to ‘Reset to Saved Defaults’ for Layout Options we have found that whilst this seems to restore everything correctly (as does Engraving Options), we can only do this one part at a time. We cannot, for example, select all parts at once and click the ‘Reset to Saved Defaults’ button. This is very time consuming!
Please can you advise us if we’re doing something wrong, or if this is a design choice?
Wes, the indirect answer to your question is that you may find it easier to import the project into a file you have set up according to your specifications. That’s what most of us are doing until templates are properly supported. There are several options for importing, but importing the other project as a flow or multiple flows would be your best bet.
Thanks for your reply Dan. Whilst this may be a good ‘workaround’ for the time being, I was more wondering if this is something that will be addressed in a future update to the software, as (to my mind) the ‘Reset to Saved Defaults’ should reset everything as if was saved?
This is not how it behaves on my system.
In Layout Options I can select several Layouts then select any setting and then Aply.
But … sometimes trying to select several layouts does not immediately works, I have to do it twice then Dorico selects several layouts
I can change any setting in multiple parts and hit Apply, but I can’t select multiple parts and then hit Reset to Saved Defaults, which is what I think Wes is wanting to do. Reset to Saved Defaults can only be applied one part at a time, which can be a bit time consuming when dealing with an orchestral piece. It would be nice to be able to select all the parts at once, select Layout type: Part, and hit Reset to Saved Defaults to reset them all with one click.
If you’re going to reset to defaults and you haven’t actually done any work on the parts, it might be easier to delete the part layouts and then go Setup > Create Default Part Layouts (or whatever that function’s called).
Yes indeed, Fred, you’ve hit the nail on the head. It would be great if it were possible to select all the parts at once, select Layout type: Part, and hit Reset to Saved Defaults to reset them all with one click. Even better, would be if there was a single button somewhere in Dorico to ‘Reset all Notation, Layout & Engraving Options to Saved Defaults’ (Full score layouts reseting to Full Score saved defaults, and part layouts to Part saved defaults etc).
Interestingly, I’ve had a play and I think the issue with the ‘Reset to Saved Defaults’ for notation options not working, was that the options selected have to be ‘applied’ to the project BEFORE pressing the ‘save as defaults’ button. This is now recalling as expected. Lesson learned!
Wes, until such time Dorico has a suite of features for importing and exporting styles and options between projects, in the first instance I’d actually recommending opening up a template project that contains all of your preferred settings, master pages, and so on, and then importing the flow or flows from the composer’s project into your template project. Provided you don’t need to preserve any of the formatting done by the composer before they submitted their project to you, this will work out quicker. It’s sort of the converse of what you are used to from Sibelius: instead of importing the styles into the music, in Dorico you import the music into the styles. (At least until such time as we have had a chance to implement our planned features for transferring settings between projects.)
Thanks very much for the response Daniel, that’s helpful. I’m sure once we get used to the way Dorico does things (as you say, sometimes the opposite way round to Sibelius) it will all become more familiar. It is a case I think of gradually adapting our current workflow & methods to fit the new age way of thinking, but very useful that you and the forum is here to help…!
Am I well understand that there is no possibility to Reset to Saved Defaults or Reset to Factory for only one category of an option dialogue at the moment (Dorico 3.5.1)? It means that the Reset to Saved Defaults or Reset to Factory button resets all categories within the opened option dialogue?
That’s right, Milos. When you reset options to saved or factory defaults, you do so for the whole kit and kaboodle. In a future version of Dorico we anticipate adding features that will make it much easier to tell how your current set of options differs from the defaults and allowing you to more selectively reset them.
I got into a fearful mess the last couple of times I tried to import a multi-scene/flow opera into Dorico via MusicXML, so I’m starting from scratch with a different approach. As part of that, I’ve imported the first scene, applied all the options I could find (Notation, Engraving, Layout) to my satisfaction, and saved each as defaults. When I import the next scenes, am I right in thinking that, after doing so, I then go to the various options pages and click on ‘Reset to Saved Defaults’, which will make all flows use the same options? I’m rather hoping the answer is ‘yes’, but I just want to make sure before I take the next steps.
No, that’s not quite the case, Gareth. Engraving Options are project-wide, so they’ll naturally be applied to everything you do in the project (this is just like Engraving Rules in Sibelius, for example). Layout Options are specific to each layout, so they will also be unaffected by importing any further flows into the project (this is just like the Document Setup or Multiple Part Appearance dialogs in Sibelius, for example).
Notation Options is the tricky one: when you import a MusicXML file into an existing project, you will end up with the default notation options from that project, and if the project was already created when you clicked ‘Save as Default’, then the default notation options in the project may or may not match those saved defaults, depending on what you changed and when you changed it. However, you’re right in that once you have imported your new flows, you can select them in the Notation Options dialog and click ‘Reset to Saved Defaults’, and that will update them.
But you don’t need to do that for Layout Options or Engraving Options, as they won’t be affected by importing more flows into your project.