Strange flow heading behavior - duplicating

Making some guitar instructional material with lots of layout overrides since each page has its own layout challenges.

When shrinking the music box, the previous flow title (A Natural Minor Scale) from 2 pages earlier is duplicated. What causes this?


Probably because the subsequent flow no longer fits on the page, and therefore the flow heading has to display the only other flow on that page (ie the end of the previous flow)

OK, this has me stumped. Why would Dorico want to display a previous flow heading, even if there isn’t room ? Why is there so much space after staff before the flow heading? Where is the setting to decrease that space? Is it possible to have a flow heading on a page and the music actually starts on the next page? Here, for example, I’ll want a couple guitar diagrams and explanation with the music for this flow starting on the next page.

I found a solution by increasing the music box to full page and manually moving down the first staff. I’d rather have the settings correct so it does that automatically.

Normally flow headings move with the music, so if the flow is no longer on the page, the flow heading will disappear.

However, if the page has local overrides, Dorico can no longer automatically add or delete frames on that page.

This is why it’s best in the first instance to do frame editing on a page template.

If you want more specific advice, you’ll need to share your project - there’s only so much that can be intuited from screenshots.

Ps your page number has ended up on the left corner, but the paragraph style remains outside-edge aligned. This can happen when you copy the left side of the Default page template to the right and don’t amend the page number text frame’s position.

I’m still new at Dorico (34 year Finale user) and could use a lot more instruction on layout issues. Here’s the file:
Essential Scales and Arpeggios.dorico (3.5 MB)

@DennisMusic this looks really good!

I suspect the tall flow heading (with that big text frame on the right) is what pushes the 2nd flow onto the next page when you lower the height of the music frame, because Dorico is accounting for that text frame before squeezing the music in. But I confess I’m not entirely sure why the extra space between the bottom of the 1st exercise and the 2nd can’t be used there, because your flow margins aren’t massive.

(Your braced-staff gap was fairly large for some reason, although that doesn’t apply anywhere in this layout – just fyi, because the braced staff gap is always used, regardless of vertical justification: braced staves can never be automatically positioned closer together than that value, but can be further if needed to accommodate dynamics etc, so I’d recommend setting that quite small.)

You can force flows to be in the same frame using “make into frame”, and then adjust manually as needed.

Depending on how much text, music etc that 2nd exercise on the last page needs, there might be other tricks you can use.

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Thanks, some good info here for my project. Not sure why the braced-staff gap was so high - I didn’t change that, at least not purposefully.