For anyone who wants to attempt this, it’s actually really easy. Since we are only modifying doricolib files and not system files, it seems pretty “safe” too. It depends slightly if you want to add your sets as additional options, or simply have your sets be the new defaults. Instructions for having your sets as defaults are below as that’s the easiest, although you can modify these to add additional sets too.
- Take a file containing Page Templates that you are satisfied with, then export both the Full Score and Part Template Sets as doricolib files.
- Open your Full Score doricolib file, scroll down to pagePairDefinitionSets, and change the entryID from “pageset.user.xxxxxxxxxxxxx” to “pageset.fullscore”
- Do the same for the Part doricolib file, but change the entryID to “pageset.part”
- In Windows, copy the doricolib files to Users\yournamehere\AppData\Roaming\Steinberg\Dorico 4\DefaultLibraryAdditions
That’s basically it! The catch is that there may now be duplicate Paragraph Styles. You can correct for these manually in the doricolib file by editing the paragraphStyleID and have it match the correct entityID as found in your userlibrary.xml, but honestly I found it easier to just stick to the main Paragraph Styles that ship with Dorico and then modify size, style, as needed in the template. A list of the shipping Paragraph Styles can be found here. All those modifications easily save in the doricolib file and then there’s no additional editing needed, and no duplicate styles.