I prepared a book with guitar accompaniments for around 140 songs and I have created à flow for each song with accompaniment.
I understood that it is better to do the final layout – especially the vertical alignments – only at the very end. But now after doing this, I need to insert another song in the middle (as they are in an alphabetic order) and of course all the vertical alignments that I had made are lost again from this new song onwards…
Suddenly I asked myself if this wouldn’t happen if I start a new frame chain for each single flow: may somebody confirm that?
If yes, and if I would still like to keep the same page template for all flows, do I need also to create a new page template for each flow, keeping for all the same layout, and only changing the frame chain each time? Is it a good idea to have 140 page templates?
I’m pretty sure page formatting travels with the page, not the flow. As much as possible, I try to use note spacing and occasional System Breaks to layout my music on the page.
The whole point of a page template is that it can apply to multiple pages. If you’re making templates for every page, then you might as well just edit the pages themselves.
Note that you can move the edits made on a page in Engrave mode – right click on a page icon and click on “Swap with Next Page”.
Also: if you really need to make manual adjustments to the vertical layout on lots of pages, could you not achieve that result (or something closer, at least) by changing the Layout Options?
The problem of making adjustments directly in the pages themselves is that they do not anymore take any changes in account that I would maybe later do in the templates. That’s why I thought to rather create more templates.
It would be great indeed to be able to make a single adjustment in a page and still to keep the other elements of the page template, even if I change the template.
I didn’t find out how that works. May you explain more precisely?
I include an example of one song (which corresponds to one flow) hereafter:
i don’t see how I may put the Layout Options in a way to have for example more vertical spacing between the systems of different accompaniments than between the systems of each single accompaniment. As far as I understand, Dorico always distributes them evenly on the page (even if it would be different flows).
There are essentially two modes of automatic spacing:
Tell Dorico to use the “Minimum Gaps” settings in Layout Options (adjusted for collisions).
Tell Dorico to do the above, and then “stretch” everything so that it fills the page. (“Vertical Justification”.)
In addition to this, you can set the number of systems on a page using Frame Breaks, in order to create more/less space on the page.
If you added a Frame Break at [2], then the first four systems would be spaced out widely, and the single-staves would be more tightly packed onto one page. Is that what you want?
No, I actually want to have it exactly as it is in the example. If I let dorico do the work, all systems are equally spaced which is useful if there is only one piece on the page. But in my case there is first the song and then 5 different accompaniment versions: if they were all equally spaced, it would be much more difficult to see that it’s actually different options.
Of course, I could make each one a separate flow, but then I would have thousands of flows at the end which is not more practical. Or I would need to create a lot of individual frames on all pages, which wouldn’t be easier as well.
I wrote already several times before in this forum: I don’t understand why there is no option to freeze all the vertical adjustments that have been done in a project. It’s very annoying that Dorico recalculates all the vertical spacing completely anew from the page onward where something is included… That’s why I was thinking about new frame chains each time as I suppose that Dorico only recalculates the spacing within the same fame chain, isn’t it?
