This is my first post. I’m a high school senior with a crazy love for media composition, and I’ve been using Dorico 5 Pro for about a year now. For classical orchestral scores, is there a recommended industry best practice for engraving settings (font choice, note spacing, line thickness, etc)? If so, I’d like to try those settings and see how they look with my scores. Can Dorico somehow export and import engraving settings, and if so, then would anyone be willing to share their engraving settings file(s)?
During my research into understanding more about engraving in Dorico, I’ve watched Dorico’s YouTube playlist titled “Engrave Mode in Dorico | How to” (8 videos), and read a forum post titled “Is Dorico’s engraved output ‘good enough’ for professional music publishing?”
I’ve seen that a recommended book is “Behind Bars” by Elaine Gould, and a recommended website is notat.io. Apparently Elaine was consulted during the process of creating the Dorico default engraving settings. Also, it seems that the Sibelius “House Style” feature is similar to what I’m looking for in Dorico.
The out of the box Dorico fonts are not a bad start for professional looking engraving. Bravura & Academico. You may wan to try out different note-spacing defaults; John B recommends 3.5 rather than 4.0 for many of his scores, but much still depends on the density of notes in each score itself.
Behind Bars is a useful reference, especially for Dorico. One can buy and on-line version as well as the first section of the printed book if one doesn’t need to go into some of the more modern/arcane notation practices. What kind of music you write/arrange will likely dictate your needs there.
Yes, you can use the Library Manager to compare documents with your current settings, and to import/export settings.
I’d really recommend finding some scores that you think are well-engraved, and trying to recreate them. Henle Verlag has a very good reputation, though they focus on piano and chamber music.
Behind Bars and notat.io are both great resources. The below are also all classic texts, well worth trying to find in print, but free to “borrow” on Archive.org:
Welcome to the forum, @Farrah_McQueen! Glad to hear you’e enjoying Dorico.
As someone who has taught composition to high school as well as undergrads and graduate students, I’m heartened by your questions and thoughtful approach to working, and I sense that you’ll continue to do so. And remember that this forum is a great place to come for help when Steinberg’s fine First Steps, tutorial videos, and online manual leave you with questions.
(Of course, now your first piece notated in Dorico will have to be the “Crazy-Love” Concerto!)
Dorico’s default options are pretty “middle of the road” and are designed to be appropriate enough for a wide variety of types of idiom and ensemble, but there will be plenty of things that reasonable people can disagree about!
You might also be interested to take a look at the Scoring Express templates offered for sale by NYC Music Services. @pianoleo was closely involved in the development of these templates, and they provide a good example of at least one way that people involved in commercial music preparation are thinking about score and parts preparation:
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