Swapping flows issue

I don’t know if it’s a bug or something not implemented yet, but when I’m trying to swap some flows (for a course/method I’m creating, realized I want to swap some chapters) only the flow title and musical content are swapped, not the layout/overrides ; so as all my pages are basically overriden they seem not to be linked to their respective flows and rather stay static, meaning I can’t actually swap flows with their custom text/layout content…

Any idea how to fix that ?

Page overrides prevent overridden content from being transported with the flow to the new location. It’s certainly a limitation at present. You have to remove the overrides, which of course causes the content to be lost.

I sometimes find it better to add this content as staff text and place it to appear as text blocks. Or of there’s a sufficient amount of text, I pivot to a DTP program and import musical elements as PDFs from Dorico.

The overrides are linked to a particular rhythmic position. Eg a system break in bar 12 will stay a system break at bar 12 no matter which flow is first.

It’s a bit annoying, I know, but it’s just how it is at the moment.

Edit: Whoops, Dan beat me

Stuff that’s inside a flow – like notes, notations, staff-attached text, and also system/frame breaks – belongs to that flow and will stay with that flow, wherever it goes.

Stuff that’s attached to a page – like frames, page templates, page template changes, flow heading changes etc, i.e. the stuff that results in a colour marking in the Pages panel in Engrave mode – belongs to that page and will stay there, even if the music on that page changes.

Just to be clear, as at first I read your comment as suggesting if you had a system break at bar 12 in flow 1, then swapped the order of flows 1-2, then flow 2 would inherit the system break at bar 12 (which is not the case) :slight_smile:

No, you were right :man_facepalming: Sorry for the misinformation everyone - I’m a fool and got my page overrides/breaks mixed up.

Thanks everyone for the replies.
I hope at some point it will be fixed, because there’s no point formatting a layout, adding text and pictures and all, if then whenever the flows are being reorganized they don’t retain the formatting that has been made for specific bars.
Especially since it’s not yet easy having a proper frame formatting system as there’s no snap/magnetic system for frames.

Anyway, I’ll have to plan more carefully my mistakes in the meantime…

You should find that using numerical values in the frames properties is very efficient. It snaps perfectly there :wink:

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Yes of course, but going there and editing all properties still feels tedious and old school when we’re so much used to having snap and magnetic layout in lots of softwares ; especially in a context of creating a method and using frames for pngs and text, having them all aligned and of the same size should be easier to achieve.

Which makes me think btw that even a basic thing like copying a frame and pasting it in order to have at least the same dimensions is not possible, so you gotta make all sorts of calculations related to the page positioning to have everything aligned, then you just pray you won’t need at some point to rearrange your frames because that’ll be a nightmare to recalculate everything.
(I mean, not that I don’t like maths, I’ve got a master’s degree in astrophysics, but that’s not quite what I’m looking for when using a modern software, especially if it’s music-related…)

Select a frame. Right-click whichever page (including the current one if you want to duplicate the frame on the source page) in the right panel of Engrave mode and click Copy Selected Frames to Selected Pages.

Sure, it’s not Ctrl/Cmd-V but it’s certainly possible, and you can paste multiple frames to multiple pages simultaneously if you so wish.

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Just tried it, it works thanks !
Not intuitive but at least it’s a workaround until we get a proper cmd+c/cmd+v or right click copy/paste.

That makes me think also, it could be nice in the future to have improved text frames that could either be independant or be working like the music frames : upon resizing, if the content doesn’t fit the frame then an other master text frame would be created, which would allow for continous text and easy reformatting when creating courses/methods/lessons.

I wish we could have as well the ability to create independant bars, especially since if we want to have a layout with for instance different exercises in different time signatures for now we still can’t hide the time signature change that’s at the end of a system ; the workaround I found for now is that I create an extra bar before the one that has a time signature change (and a system break before this bar) and I use the “remove rests” function, it still ads a barline but at least I can have separate exercises on separate systems without seeing the new time sig at the end of every system…
(I know some people use multiple flows for each bar but honestly in a method context with hundreds of exercises I’m not quite interested in having hundreds of flows to handle, whether for the sake of having a clean file or for my computer’s CPU/RAM)

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I thought the usual “easy” workaround is the coda technique… What’s wrong with it? Or maybe you are not aware of it? You can have as many codas as you need in a flow and it “hides” precautionary time and key signatures, IIRC.

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oh yes let’s say I was half-aware of it haha
I mean now that you mention it I remember reading about that in the forum but I guess as it was a point in time when I didn’t need it yet I must have forgotten about this workaround, thanks for the reminder !