Hello everyone, it’s that time of year when I’m making a booklet of carols for a brass ensemble. I have each carol as a separate flow and managed to find the setting to allow more than one flow per page in the layout options. I now have all the carols filling the pages but no room to put titles in between them. Is it possible to set a spacing between flows? I tried dragging the staff on the parts page but it only moves the one I’m dragging or I can use the option drag but this gradually closes together all other staves following the drag. I just want a gap between each carol. If anyone can help I’d be grateful.
Dear Davetoria,
I remember having read threads about the same subject, before the update. I do not know wether the update has changed anything on this topic, but I don’t think so.
You should be able to achieve the exact result that you want using the layouts of the Engrave mode. You can create your custom Layout, with different music frames — you specify which layer goes on which frame, text frames between them — you specify everything about the text appearence… Not automatic at all, but VERY powerful.
If you do not want to go this way, you can still use the new button in Engrave mode, on the left panel : Staff spacing. With it enabled, you select the big square of the first staff of the flow you want to nudge down, and press alt arrow or use the mouse.
Hope it helps !
Thank you but this does not really help. If I unlink the frames and tell them which flow to contain the part keeps adding pages with flows from everywhere including other parts. I need up with a trumpet part with 20 pages! the first three were what I wanted but Dorico just went off on its own tack. As for dragging staves, as i said, you can either drag just one which doesn’t help or opt/alt drag but that closes together all others following which is also not what I want. I also don’t seem to be able to force staves to move onto another page so if i do drag they end up in a heap at the bottom. It’s impossible to defend dorico when I have done all I can to stick with it but now have to hold my hands up and go back to Sibelius. There i will simply click on a staff and drag it down, all others will just retain their spacing and move. I’d have finished this long ago if I’d switched back sooner. Not what I paid a large sum of money for. Perhaps if one of the team would demonstrate clearly Flows, Frames page layout etc it would help.
Unfortunately we don’t yet have a good mechanism for inserting breaks between flows on the same page: the very simple flow break feature we have (that automatically makes a new flow start a new page) is not really suitable for this kind of operation.
If you need to add gaps between flows manually, this is the workflow I would suggest:
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At the end of the first flow, decide how many more systems you can fit on the page when you have increased the distance between flows, and insert a frame break if necessary to move one or more systems that are currently on the page onto the next page. Do this by selecting the first note on the system that should become the first system of the next page, and type Shift+F or choose Engrave > Format Music Frames > Frame Break.
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You should now have enough room on the first page to increase the distance between flows manually. Switch on the switch to enable staff spacing in the Staff Spacing section of the left-hand panel. Click the system handle (the large one aligned with the top of the staff) to select the system, then hold Ctrl and click the system handles for the other systems below that one on the page, so that they are all selected. Now use Ctrl+Alt+down arrow to move them all down and create the necessary gap.
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Now you can add the title, either by dragging out a new text frame or by typing it in via Shift+X.
I would not pretend that this workflow is as easy or as smooth as it should be. Once we have proper support for flow breaks in the middle of layouts this will become a breeze, but it’s definitely not a breeze at the moment, and I’m sorry for the frustration you have experienced.
Thank you Daniel, that’s great. I desperately want to stick with Dorico and that has helped me do so, I’m grateful for you taking the time to reply. I’m looking forward to ‘Explode’ for chords and now ‘Flow Breaks’!
Just to say it worked perfectly and I met my deadline working completely in Dorico thanks to help on this excellent forum. In my earlier post I said ‘I’d have finished this by now in Sibelius’ but I would have been more accurate saying ‘I’d have finished this by now if there was a user manual’! I hope people using the demo from tomorrow access the forum as it would be terrible if they didn’t give this superb software a fair review because of lack of user knowledge. Thanks to all here for your help.
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Is there any update on being able to add space between flows automatically? Perhaps the space before flow title could work even without a flow title?
I suppose it should work, even with spaces (made by space bar) if needed. This thread was really old, like exactly two years before we got flow titling!
Yes, old. But it seemed a pertinent location for the question!
I don’t want to have to title the flows as spaces… I was wondering if that setting could be made to work (in a future update) even if the flow titles were set to ‘never’.
If you are bothered about the time-waste of having to delete the default titles from every flow in the Project Info, don’t do that. Just edit the default flow heading “master page” to contain nothing.
You can make space above and below the heading with the Flow Heading Margin settings in Layout Options / Page Setup / FLows.
Ah… thanks Rob, I hadn’t thought of doing that in the Master Pages.
Yes. I was not suggesting that you title your flow with spaces, only to replace the flow titles tokens with spaces “if needed”. This is in the masterpages section indeed.
It is now 2023. I’m wondering if there is any update on this topic? The problem I’m having is that I’ve set up a flow header layout that has the flow title, arranger, composer, copyist, and a section for “other information”
The Other information box in the setup section for each flow contains anything from one to 6 lines of text.
The problem I’m encountering is that even if I set up the flow header to accommodate the maximum amount of text I need there’s no way for the music staves to automatically adjust.
Same thing if I set the text box to the minimum size I need.
Either way I would appear that I would have to do completely manual adjustments on every page for every part – for each of the flows —— in order to get the spacing I need.
To hit my deadline I guess I’ll have to use a different (almost equally frustrating) method to create what I need manually.
I’m actually kind of surprised that this issue has not been addressed yet. Is there any prospect that this concept is something that can be added to the feature request list? The lack of flexibility/automation in this domain makes it almost impossible to use Dorico to do tune books with short melodies – I’m even thinking that I might have to use the absolute clunkiest of methods and do it all in Indesign like I’ve done previous tune folios.
all suggestions welcome.
In order to hit my
I guess I’ll just have remove all of the flow header information and go back to my old method of just putting two or more tunes together in one flow and forcing it on to one page with space in between for notes, titles, and etc.
I have to say that I’m a little disappointed to discover that I likely won’t be able to use Dorico for the music folio I’ll be doing later in the year. Using .eps exports of music and placing them as images in Indesign creates a terrible complicated work flow for the music editing process, but it would seem that the layout components of Dorico are not yet advanced enough to accommodate the kind of flexibility that our music books need.
I, too , would love to see dynamic text frames that could expand add needed to hold whatever one put into a token such as Other Info. I could make use of that to add dialogue cues to individual songs in a theater score. That and rich text tokens would be ideal, but I do not kid myself how complex implementing that would be.
So until that day arrives, I consider using differently sized Header Templates, so if I have to adjust from one song to the next, at least I can call on pre-existing templates instead of adjusting each one separately.
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multiple templates is a good idea, but I’d probably end up with a template for each tune (though that might have to be the option I go with). Thanks for the suggestion.