For a large orchestra work, I often have several pages before the first page of music. Title page, a blank page so things appear where they should, instrumentation, program note, dedication, and so on.
Do people generally do all this work in dorico, or in a word processor or other program and then combine into the PDF later?
Being new to Dorico I find the page templates and page layout a bit cumbersome. Just wondering if this is part of the learning curve or me using the wrong tool.
From my experience it’s certainly part of the learning curve if you come from a non-desktop-publishing-like-notation program.
Please watch John Barron’s
video, it’s very comprehensive. Maybe you have to watch it twice – as I did – to understand the context, but it’s worth it.
Here’s a screenshot showing what it would look like. Works pretty well. Basically, make a bunch of different page templates for the front matter and apply them one by one.
Dorico 6.1 is still not up to the demands I place on front matter, and likely won’t be for a while, as it is likely not high on their list of improvements at this time. I use InDesign or even Word to make these pages and insert them into the final PDF.
I’m curious where you feel it falls short? For front matter, it’s great. For longer, text-intensive documents, not so much.
I’d like some word-wrap options and columns. Also, it doesn’t really do kerning, hyphenation, and widow/orphan control. Even on front matter of two or three pages, I need all this. Like I said, I don’t expect them to add these, so I use the right tool for the job.
Oh, as a heavy InDesign user, I say Amen to all that.
My biggest trouble with front matter is that if you prepend pages with other template styles for flows after the first flow, the tokens don’t correspond to the correct flow, without requiring additional workarounds. It only switches flows once the first bar is displayed.
Perhaps there’s a way around this that doesn’t feel like a hack, but it discourages me from using one file with many flows for work that requires this (i.e. musicals where you want a blank page between numbers to show the next cue’s title material.)
