Issue: in Dorico 5.1.51.2153 (the most recent version as of today), as in previous versions, I cannot find any way to assign space before or after a paragraph.
So I made a Paragraph Style (Engrave tab, Library, Paragraph Styles) that is for hidden text. I set it to 2 pt and I made it so the foreground color is white. That should make it hidden on white paper. Dorico correctly hides that text on screen, but it erroneously outputs it to the PDF. (Seems like any color with opacity set to zero should also not print, but that didn’t work, either.)
If someone has a better way to accomplish what I want, please chime in.
Make sure you chose Color, when you export your PDF:
For the spaces maybe you can use the Leading function (editing the tokens in the First page template), and no need for a workaround with hidden white text (I deleted the"f" in First page template):
There’s a “gap after paragraph” setting for each paragraph style. You could duplicate whatever style you’re using in this frame, give the duplicate a gap, and apply the duplicate style to specific lines of text in the text frame.
Another, much less elegant solution, is similar to your original idea, but simply add an empty space character on the intervening line.
@Christian_R, I tested it, and exporting to color PDF rather than black and white does allow me to use my hack and not have the little “f” show up in the PDF. Thank you! Now I recall that I used to print the PDFs in color, but I decided it was overkill, so I switched to black and white. I did not notice the subtle change: the color PDFs did not reveal what I intended to be the hidden character, but the black and white ones did.
@Lillie_Harris, I am so glad that there is that “Gap after paragraph” setting! Thank you for showing me. I did not know it was there. I’ve now started using “Gap after paragraph”. However, I can’t get Dorico 5.1 to save my changes. They disappear when I try to save them. I’ve sent you a PM with a link to a screencast showing the problem. It’s probably something I’m doing wrong … [EDIT: Lillie pointed out the problem. I wasn’t clicking outside of the text box to make my changes “stick” in the Page Template.]
I thought I had tried that, and a space all by itself could not be resized or have a paragraph style assigned to it or something, but I’ll test it as an option if I can’t get “Gap after paragraph” to work reliably.
Now for some theory: I think that my “hack” should work, even with black and white PDFs. I just tried setting the foreground color of the font to black and setting the opacity to 0%. That should mean that there is no black there, I think. It didn’t work, i.e., the little “f” character shows up in the PDF (printing to B&W PDFs). I also tried the same thing with white as the foreground color with the same result (when printing to B&W PDFs). So it seems to me that Dorico’s opacity settings are not really working when one prints to B&W PDFs … At least for me it is unexpected behavior. But I can change my expectations .
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