I believe this has been discussed here but I’m curious what users’ opinions are about using existing files as templates. I’ve finished the arrangement of the first act of an opera and I’ve gradually been tweaking settings in an attempt to get the best results. These are often not settings I would necessarily set as defaults for all files, but for Act 2 I’d like to keep the same settings. I have no idea what elements Dorico keeps if one removes all the music, dynamics and lyrics, and starts replacing them with new material. Is formatting reset? Is it advisable to keep the old flows but to empty them, or just to delete everything and start again?
You can delete everything in the score, and all of your settings will remain in place. That’s what I always do.
Doing so preserves all engraving options, notation options, and layout options, as well as custom playing techniques and paragraph/font styles.
Oh, and it keeps all your master pages as well.
Don’t forget that you can import any Flow from one project into another project. So you can make a duplicate, import a new Flow and delete the old ones, and you’ve got a ‘new’ document with the same options as the original.
…although I sometimes lose Notation Option settings this way, since they’re flow-specific.
I should say, this happens for XML import, at least.
Thank you both. Am I correct to assume that if you delete all the flows except the first, the notation option settings of the first flow will be preserved and ported to the next flows to be created? In Finale I’m so used to certain unwanted attributes being preserved between files while losing others which I did need…
In fact if no flows exist, then the default notation options (as specified in Dorico’s factory settings, or the ones you’ve saved as defaults by clicking ‘Save as Default’ in Notation Options) will be used for a new flow.
Thanks, Daniel. That’s what I figured and it’s the reason I did want to leave one flow and empty it, so that I could keep the settings I’d determined for that particular project.