Unlink text frames in duplicated layouts

Dorico
1

I’m having the need to use the new Duplicate Layouts feature in Dorico 4 for one of the first times this morning, and I’m running into a frustration with text frames.

I’m making alternate versions of an assignment for my music theory students, and I want to change certain things about the instructions, which are in a text frame (override, not in the master page). However, I’m finding that editing this text in a frame in one layout is changing the corresponding frame in the other layouts as well. I understand why this might be desirable in many workflows, but it’s almost never what I would want, nor is it how I would expect this feature to behave. This would make sense for music frames, since they’re filled by flows, but text frames don’t have the same content/presentation separation (at least not in a way that is user-transparent).

Is there a way to turn off the link between corresponding text frames in different duplicated layouts?

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2

Unfortunately, there is no simple, direct command to unlink frames. The only way to do it is to delete and re-create the frame in the page template. Such a command would be a welcome addition, of course.

3

Huh. This is a real bummer since frames can’t be copy-pasted, and I’d really like them to be uniform across all the variations of this layout. And there’s also no indication anywhere that they are linked, which caused me to lose a couple hours of work early this morning.

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