I find that if I open Craig’s “A4 problem.dorico” file, add a new player (holding, say, a flute), assign it to the flow, then look at the new part layout’s Layout Options, it’s set to A4, despite the fact that my own default part layout size is a custom one (320x240mm).
If I start a new project, add a player and look at that player’s part layout, I see that it’s 320x240mm.
There does seem to be some discrepancy here.
Evidently, any existing scores may contain residue that is locked into A4. I hope there is a way to clear that out because I have created 15 or more templates for different kinds of projects and I would hate to have to recreate all of those templates from scratch.
I doubt if I have actually created a completely new score for 2 years. And I find it necessary to work that way because I know of no easy way to transfer blocks of settings from one score to another, except by creating a template that has all the settings I need for a certain type of project.
That is indeed the only way, currently, until they implement proper support for house styles.
Surely that is a bug, that an existing score would continue to emit A4 players, regardless of what you have set as either parts defaults or as international preferences. I note this topic has 6500 views and over 100 posts, has persisted for 4 years,and has yet to be acknowledged as a problem by the company. Obviously a large number of people have been affected by this. I understand local peculiarities may be difficult to understand or reproduce, but in this case, the locale is all of North America.
Thanks, Leo, I’ve been looking at this for the last couple of hours following your post, and I can now see what’s going on.
The fundamental problem is that the default layout options in the project itself don’t reflect the default layout options that are used for new projects: the new layout objects in the project are still set to use A4 page size, while the defaults are indeed set to use Letter.
The reason for the discrepancy, I think, is that when you start a new project, Dorico isn’t correctly applying the default options to the score, and there are inconsistencies between different operations that you carry out in the project. For example, when you add a new player, this causes a new layout to be created, but that new layout is created with the factory default layout options, rather than your saved default layout options for that kind of layout, if you have some.
So there are two things we need to fix: we need to make sure that when a new layout is created by creating a new player that it uses the saved defaults for layout options rather than the factory ones, and we also need to make sure that those saved defaults are correctly applied to a new project when you create it.
One thing that you do need to be aware of is that when you create a new layout in a project, it will use the saved default options from that project, which is a clone of what the saved default options were at the time you created the project, rather than the state of what those saved default options are at that moment.
So if you create a project, then later on click Save as Default in the Layout Options dialog while working on another project, then reopen the original project and create a new layout, it will use the saved options that were in force when you created that project, not the updated defaults that you subsequently created.
Hope that makes sense.
Thanks for persisting with this so that I could get to the bottom of it. Things should be in a better state in the next update.
Thank you.
I was speaking of your method of saving a “template” file.
Yes, I understand. And because of that, I don’t create new files from scratch. And because of that, I trip up on this problem area. It is sort of a chain reaction.
Just to confirm, this issue applies to all Layout Options, not just page size? If so, any fix to this would probably also correct the “Show bar numbers at rehearsal marks” issue I posted above as well, right?
Yes, that’s right, and yes, I would expect it to resolve that issue as well, for new projects you create subsequent to getting a build containing this fix.
In this case, you would be assuming wrong. 
This is still a problem and I still haven’t gotten to the bottom of it. True enough, if I create a new project while my preferences are North America, then any time I add a new player, I get letter as the paper size. That’s great.
But I still have projects that I have set every layout to Letter (or Tabloid for scores), but when I add another player, it has A4 size.
It does not happen on every old project. On some of them, when I add a player, it comes in as Letter. I can’t make out a pattern. but it keeps biting me in the tail.
I suspect that some of your older files were set before you updated your preference to explicitly be North America. There is probably some setting in the file that is still being honored now. Dorico probably things “this file was set to have A4 parts,” so whenever you add new ones, that’s what it does. It wouldn’t make sense to add parts of different sizes.
Just my theory anyway.
In fairness, I did say that several months ago; so things may have changed since then. 
And one aberration does not a rule break.
As a general rule, your theory is more sound than not. There’s a reason discord warns you that “are you sure you what to post? No one has responded to this thread in 8 months…” etc.
It is certainly behaving that way. If there is, I wish there were a way to zap that without having to import the flows from my old projects into a clean .dorico file. And right now, the only practical way to discover the problem is to open every old project, add a player and see what happens.
I guess I should find two old projects – one that exhibits the problem and one that doesn’t – and strip them down to the bare minimum as exemplars.
Surely you can just open the layout options and inspect one part to see what size it is set to?
Well, no. I have tried to go back to all of my projects and fix all the layouts that were mistakenly set to A4, so I hope there aren’t any bad layouts out there. To detect the problem I have to add another player and see what happens.
That’s precisely my point: all you need to do is open the layout properties panel and look at the page setup of a part. You shouldn’t have to add anything to figure out what size the existing parts are set to.
Doing the latter will only inform you what the current behavior is, but that’s irrelevant if you’re just checking to fix errors already present.
I think I have already found all the incorrect layouts, at least all the ones I care about. I have already changed them manually and re-edited the payouts.
What I m trying to deal with is the underlying problem. If I never have to touch these projects again then there is no problem, but it is quite common for me to go back into an old project to add other players for one reason or another. In these cases I invariably get all the way through the editing process before I realize the player was added as A4. So then I have to go back and do 20 minutes of redundant editing on that layout to look good on Letter size.
So I would like to go back into the old projects and fix them to stop creating A4 parts, if that is possible with anything short of importing into a fresh template.
Just a side note – but isn’t it funny that it is the country that left the Empire first, the one to be the last one to be still using Imperial units?
Paolo