An August Morning (new) – Robert Stern.dorico (1.1 MB)
Hey everybody,
I’m new to this, so please be gentle.
I am trying to write the title, instrumentation, and a few other “header” type items into this score. Normally, I’ve been figuring out pretty well in other scores how to do this in engrave mode, clicking the first page template, then making appropriate changes.
But in this score, no matter what I change, I can’t make the vertical space for the title bigger. Right now it looks “ok”, but the dot in the “i” of the title still gets cut off. I can’t seem to add other text fields above or below the title that will actually appear on the score.
Anyone have an idea of what I’m doing wrong?
Thank you!
You’ve edited the First page template correctly, but all those red triangles in the Pages section on the right in Engrave mode indicate local page overrides. Page overrides prevent the page changing, even if you edit the underlying page template.
You’ve got an awful lot of page overrides, which suggests you’re missing some Dorico tricks: it’s not obvious what edits you’ve done to all those pages, but I’d recommend removing them.
Be careful: your Default page templates has the odd-numbered page number text frame on the left (inside) corner, rather than the right (outside) corner. This is probably from you copying the left page over to the right page (which copies directly, rather than as a mirror). As long as the frames have a link (ie were previously copied), then changing the contents of text frames should affect both left and right pages: this can reduce the amount of copying page layouts that you need to do.
Interesting. All I can think of for page overrides that I’ve done on some of the pages is that I’ve moved some measures around from one system to the system previous. Does that count as something I shouldn’t be doing?
In a Dorico course I took, the teacher recommended copying L to R whenever editing the page templates, never explaining why. So I’ve been doing that with each edit because I thought I was “supposed to”. But no?
Those should both be fine. An override is generally when you move something on a particular page in Engrave mode that the page inherited from the template.
So for example, the page template has a text frame for the project title. If you move this frame on the page for one layout (as opposed to moving it in the template, for all layouts), that’s an override.
Ok, I just clicked to remove page overrides on only the first page, and that freed up the space in the header area.
I guess this is just another area of Dorico I don’t yet understand, but I will try to learn.
I keep wishing there was a more intuitive point and click way of using all the fields found in the “project info” box, where you could just check one of the items and tell it you want it to appear in your score in the standard placement, which you could then tweak if needed.
I think I sort of understand what you’re saying, though I’m a beginner, so I’m just learning. I still don’t get through my brain why we need to change a template, if we’re only changing it for the purpose of changing 1 document. I could understand doing that if we were creating a template to use in multiple pieces, but it seems a little too abstract and unnecessarily complicated for 1 piece at a time. Or am I missing something?
When you change a page template within a project file, you’re only changing it for that project. Other projects will not inherit those changes.
When you’re inside text frames, you can right-click to select tokens to insert.
The reason for editing templates is for consistency and reproducibility: it means in an orchestral piece with 4 different scores (for example, condensed, uncondensed, vocal score, and a small study layout) plus all the parts, you don’t need to make changes in every single layout.
You can also share you edited or new templates between projects, which saves time when setting up the next one.
It’s OK that it’s all still new, and of course there’s always places for improvement, but do have faith that the developers (my colleagues) who have put a lot of time into creating this software have reasons for doing it this way.
1 Like
Ok, Lillie. Thank you. That does help me to get more perspective. While we’re at it, do you happen to know of an article or how-to that demonstrates best practices in Dorico for, as you say, creating say a full score for a piano concerto, then with minimal duplication of effort, creating a 2-piano version of that same piece, with the original solo piano part getting copied in. Or the same thing for a full opera score versus piano/vocal score. Thank you!
