Still better to assemble pdfs vs. importing multiple Flows?

Dorico
1

I’m assembling 12 SATB pieces for a spiral bound book:
Importing the flows causes major formatting headaches including loss of page overrides, manual staff spacing, etc. Massive re-formatting required.
To me, this seems to defeat the purpose of Flows, but perhaps I misunderstand.
Are there any workarounds worth trying, or is it easier to just export individual PDFs of each Flow, and assemble in a 3rd party PDF program?
Thx,
Randy

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Flows are so you can have all your music in one file, and manage it in “chunks” according to how you conceive it. But remember: you’re taking something that is already formatted according to different settings in another file and then bringing it in to a second file that very well may have different settings, etc. There would be narry a way for Dorico to keep things the same between files and still combine them. The settings of the new file apply to the data that you’ve just imported. You don’t copy and paste text from one word doc into another and then become surprised when the text flows according to the file that received the “copy”. You expect that new text to flow according to the document that has received it. The same goes for Dorico.

So yes, if you want things to remain exactly as you’ve engraved them, then you need to assemble the engraved files (PDFs). If you want to assemble everything together and then engrave it in one go once you set the order of flows, then you can do it that way as well. But Dorico never purported to combine differently & already engraved files into one. You’re only transferring and importing the musical data.

3 Likes
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Yes, importing the flows just pours the notation into the existing project’s Layout, which doesn’t have any edits in it at this point.

However, I’d have to say that I knock out any number of SATB scores with no manual edits, save for a couple of system breaks. Are you really sure that you couldn’t achieve a decent result just from judicious Layout Options, Engraving Options and Page Templates – with maybe a tiny bit of tweaking, if absolutely necessary…?

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Thanks very much for the explanation. The Word doc analogy is helpful.
Nevertheless, I can’t help but be a bit disappointed there isn’t a better workaround. In my perfect little world inhabited by unicorns and rainbows, I surmise that the very clever developers of this excellent program could somehow devise a means for users to “freeze” page layouts. Or maybe not.
Wishful thinking…

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I’m having a similar problem, except with orchestral music. I have quite a lot of hidden playing techniques that are used to trigger plug-in articulations. I already hid these in Write mode, then discovered that I had to do it all again in Engrave mode, but now when I import a flow they are no longer hidden. Likewise with dynamic markings; I sometimes use them to control the sound of my virtual mock-up, but when I import the flow they are visible again. I tried making them red, so they would be easy to spot, but it doesn’t work. I like the idea of being able to fix the formatting in a flow. Suggestions for a workaround would be most welcome.

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I think this could work very well for the scores, there are various pdf editors and publishing software that would do it, but it wouldn’t work easily for the orchestral parts, where you might have several flows on a single part, and 30 or more separate parts for all the individual players. I need a way of assembling the different flows into the same project - the only way I can think of is to combine them before doing anything in Engrave mode.

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The problem here is to do with the fact that properties like Hidden for playing techniques are bound to a specific layout, unless you have Set local properties set to Globally when you set them.

When you import a flow into a different project, the internal identifiers for the layouts can be different: for part layouts they almost certainly will be different, while for full score layouts, normally they will match (since by default the first layout in any project is the full score), but it’s not guaranteed.

Dorico doesn’t currently do a good enough job of mapping between the layouts in the project you’re importing into and the project where the flow came from. This is something we would like to improve in future. I’m sorry for the inconvenience caused in the meantime.