I just finished a large score for orchestra. I spent a lot of time adjusting all of the staves on each page. I wanted to move some of the Flows around. I first locked the layout. Then I made a copy. When I opened the copy, everything was fine. When I moved a Flow to a new location, a lot of my page formatting went goofy (staves too close, etc.) The behavior I expected was I could move Flows around without messing with the layouts of other Flows. Is this too much to ask?
Unfortunately, yes, it is. When you make manual staff spacing changes, those changes are associated with a page, not with the music. If you move flows around, you then have different music appearing on the pages with manual staff spacing changes. This is why it’s usually recommended that manual anything should be the last step in your layout process (although this is not always possible).
Note that locking the layout only locks the measures on each system and page, by adding system and frame breaks. It has no effect on things like manual staff and note spacing.
Hi @john_stubbs, in Dorico generally should not be necessary to move “all of the staves”, as its automatic spacing algorithms, based on your global Options, should give a good result.
It would be interesting to have a look at your Dorico project, to see why you were needing so much manual adjustments. If you could share the file here, we can give advice on how to obtain a good result without manual moving things around. And if is not possible to adjust things automatically, it could be of interest for the Team to see it, to implement improvements into the functionalities and the workflow. Thank you.
When I have to make radical adjustments to a page (to include extended dialogue over a vamp in a musical theater piece) I always use custom page templates. One feature that would make this process easier would be the ability to create a custom page template from an existing page. Then, if an alteration caused a page to move, one could simply reassign the custom page template to the appropriate page.
The ability to create custom page templates from an existing page has been suggested numerous times, and I expect that in due course, when the resources are available and the timing is right, the Development Team will find a solution.
Well, that explains a lot. But what an unfortunate bug, I mean feature…
Can I assume you are on the Dorico Team? I would be glad to share my file. It’s big! and can I assume it will be safe to share it? It’s a 17.9 MB file. And I’m totally open to reset all of the settings and try out the automatic spacing algorithms. I was afraid it would look like the difference between a monospace font and a proportional font. Would that solve the problem of moving flows around without spacing going all goofy?
Hi @john_stubbs, I am not part of the Dorico Team, I am a normal user like you.
I would love to see your Dorico project to give my suggestions. If it is bigger then 4MB, you can upload it on some cloud service as Dropbox or Google Drive and post here the link, or send me it as a private message. But if you post the link here it would be better because so other people can make suggestions as well. And the Team sees it too (but we want to save them some time, trying to answer some of the requests ourselves, so they can concentrate on developing amazing new features 
)
If you’re worried about copyright (I newer see a case of copyright infringement in this Forum) you can select the music and apply the pitch transformations that you find on the menu Write>Transform, so your music is not recognisable.
If you want to make a cutdown version of your project here a useful post:
Just so you know, the Steinberg employees all have a little red Steinberg logo in their avatars, like this:
If I did let Dorico handle the formatting of the staves, would that solve the problem of moving Flows around without messing with other pages downstream? And is there a way to reset my score to let Dorico use its algorithms?
Yes and Yes.
Please consider uploading a Dorico file as suggested above.
here you go:
Thank you for the file, @john_stubbs. Besides the manual staff spacings everywhere and several page overrides (which is all resettable with two clicks), your Music Frames in the page templates are strangely much smaller then your page could accommodate (because of your page margins):
Can you tell more of what you are trying to obtain? Is tabloid your desired page size? What Page margins do you need? This is important as starting point. There are then many options that you need to decide what you need: page margins (top, bottom, left, right).
Anyway I will now prepare a version of your project with a Full Score v2 layout with all automatic spacings… (please be patient). Wow, there are several issues, and the file is real big. I cannot promise to be able to send a version soon (many other things to do).
But here other decision to be made, that influence the layout: do you want to use condensing? Which is the minimum space size that you would like to have (Layout Options>Page Setup>Space Size)? Etc…
I should have warned you about the unusual margins. With these margins, I first print on 11 x 17 inch paper on commercial printers. From there, I use custom cut 10 x 13 inch paper which is becoming the standard size for orchestra music in the states. If I could afford my own printer, I could program it to use 10 x 13 paper…This is my workaround for the last 25 years.
The beauty of Dorico page templates is that they can adapt to different print sizes
(and every layout can be configured to a different page size)
Forget it!
My unusual page formatting is more a solution to the limitations to commercial printing machines rather than any shortcoming with Dorico. I must print on custom 10x13 paper which is not supported on commercial machines.
what would condensing do to the score?
thanks