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.
