transferring font styles to other project

Dorico
#1

Hi everyone,

I know this was brought up a while ago, but now that we’re several versions ahead in Dorico, I was wondering if there was a better way to handle the following:

If I have two distinct projects that are quite far along, and have made adjustments to Layout/Engraving/Notation options to one of them, I’ve learned that to transfer those settings to the second project, I save the first project’s settings as the new default, then open the second project and “reset to default”. “Defaults” essentially becomes a temporary clipboard to copy and paste settings to subsequent projects.

This works for Layout/Engraving/Notation options, but I haven’t found a similar way to transfer over all of the font styles, paragraph styles, and the other engraving options not found in the general “Engraving Options”.

Basically, I’m just looking for a way to quickly make the second file match the first file in terms of every single setting so that they look consistent when printed. I know this is what flows should accomplish, but I’m working with thousands of measures and my computer can’t keep up with the lags when I don’t split it up among different projects.

Thanks for any advice.

#2

Paragraph Styles can also be saved as defaults; there isn’t an easy way to sync Font Styles, sadly.

The difficult way involves adding FontStyleEntityDefinitions to the XML of either the userdefaults.xml file or a separate .doricolib file.

#3

Thanks very much for the response!

If I wanted to explore the XML options you mentioned, can more info be found in the official documentation? Or is that something more likely to be found in other forum discussions?

Sounds like if I can write some kind of command-line script that applies my list of preferred fonts (as JSON, etc.) to any existing file, that might be the most versatile option.

(P.S. Thank you for pointing out the ability to save Paragraph Styles defaults – I forgot that it allowed for this…)

#4

Are you on Windows or Mac?

To edit the userlibrary.xml on Windows, it’s Users–Your Username–AppData–Roaming–Steinberg–Dorico 3.5–userlibrary.xml. Make sure Dorico is closed first.

Search the document for “fontstyles,” which will take you about 3/4 of the way to the bottom. It should be sorta intuitive to edit it there. Definitely copy a backup to your desktop first!

Caveat: I think this is how you do it. I’ve messed with other XML stuff, like instrument definitions and adding custom key commands, but not this before.

EDIT: I’m not sure this is correct though. What I’m describing is global, not project-specific… I’ll leave this comment up, but maybe Ben or someone else can clarify.

#5

Thanks Dan!

Sorry – I should have mentioned that I’m on a Mac.

I think you’re right that the global settings may not actually be relevant here; it sounds like what you’re describing is a way to change the defaults for any newly created project, whereas what I’m after is the way to change existing projects only (and on a case-by-case basis). I’m guessing that if it’s project-specific that I’m looking for, there must be some XML component of the each Dorico file itself that’s in some way user-editable?

#6

I think you’re right. In which case, it’s beyond this Bear of Little Brain!

#7

No, Andrew, I’m afraid you can’t do this by editing the Dorico project files themselves. We will have features in future to make it possible to more easily import styles from other projects, but at the moment the only way you’d be able to do it would be to take a project file that contains the font styles you want to use, make a copy of it (e.g. using File > Save As), then delete the players and flows from that project, then use File > Import > Flows to import the flows from the project that you want to use the different font styles. The downside of this approach is that any existing formatting and tweaks in Engrave mode that exist in the imported flow will be lost when you import into another project.

#8

Thanks Daniel – glad to hear it may be an option in the future, but for now, changing it manually is certainly fine.

And thanks again Dan for your suggestion about the global defaults via XML… I think I’ll still explore this option.