Using Custom Layouts

Dorico
1

Hi all, just wondering if I’m using the Custom layout function appropriately.

ELEMENTS version by the way, so no Engraving answers please!

So I’m working on a musical, and writing the 14 songs, each as a flow, within the whole project titled by the name of the musical. As I added flows for each song the screen real estate started looking a bit busy, and the overview got smaller and smaller. So I decided to create Custom Layouts for each song, so that I could maximise the screen for adding parts and players etc without having to deal with other flows in my view.

My question is, is this an efficient way to work? I can see of course that I’m going to have to create individual custom layouts as well for the players in each song, reductions etc. So I may end up with a very large number of layouts. Let’s say I have a Song 1 layout, then create 4 more layouts for the each of the players in that song, and so on for each song. Does this sound sensible? Is this what others are doing? New to Dorico, and diving in and out of the tutorial videos and manual etc, but of course as most of us do I expect, running before I can walk to get the work down fast!

Any advice gratefully received.
Simon

2

Certainly this is a reasonable way to work. You can drag the layouts up and down in the Layouts panel to keep them organised.

3

Thanks Daniel.

4

I sometimes create one “working layout” and assign just the instruments or flow I need to it for a working session and then change the instruments or flow when working on a different section rather than creating a separate layout every time.

5

Hi Derek,

that’s an interesting idea too, will give that a go.
Ta