Vestige flows are printed - remove?

I had a project of 24 flows. I deleted four flows. Now when I print the score to PDF I still get 24 flows with the last four being vestiges of the deleted flows. What remains are empty frames with their text labels (eg {@flowTitle@}. I guess this is a bug - unless I have done something silly. The behaviour is repeatable on other projects.

Can you share a project where this happens? With a description of what you did - especially anything you did directly on the pages that don’t disappear.

What I’m fairly sure will be the case is that the pages of the deleted flows have local page overrides, which lock that page into place. Removing the overrides of pages that are no longer needed deletes them.

Yes I’ll send a file that demonstrates this. I’ll send it tomorrow.

In the meantime, just for clarity, where I delete flows all my work is deleted but a wire frame with text token fields remains and that I what I am referring to. For example suppose a deleted flow had two pages then there would be two wire frame pages. This does not occur in the parts pdf outputs - only the score.

Yes that sounds like you’ve edited those pages directly, producing overrides. That means Dorico knows that it has to preserve those pages exactly as you left them. When layouts have no overrides, Dorico will add or remove pages fluidly depending on the music, length of flows etc.

You could also try adding a new full score layout, and then without touching anything in that layout, delete or add a flow. You should find that pages are added/removed automatically.

So, it has been a long time since I started this thread. I have been considering the replies and getting more experienced. I thank Lillie Harris for her suggestions.

What I have found is that Deletion of flows is quirky. Yes Lillie is right if one tries to delete one or more flows by deleting them in the lower panel of the setup window they will all disappear (as one would expect) but when printing layouts these flows may persist in a vestigial form (eg showing the text tokens) for any deleted flow that has had any kind of override. The overrides typically coming from using operations in the Engrave mode which directly and uniquely affect any particular flaw.

I have also found that attempting to delete a flow from the project info dialogue (select and use the bin) causes my installation of Dorico Pro 3.5 to freeze and needs me to apply the Mac OS BigSur ‘force quit’ function.

Whether what I am describing is a bug or a ‘feature’ of Dorico Pro I suggest it is unsatisfactory behaviour. The problem I found in deleting flows in the project info dialogue is surely a bug.

It has been suggested that the printing of a flow correctly includes a vestigial presence of deleted flows because there is precedence given to the presence of overrides. In my view this is not logical as if a used has decided to delete a flow surely they want to remove all trace of it?

Dorico doesn’t know whether your override is related to a specific flow, or related to some standalone text, or related to a title page, or related to a back cover page, or in order to insert some sort of foot-note, or…

All Dorico knows is that you’ve done something to an individual page that differs from what the linked Master Page defines. Note that the override always applies to the individual page, not to the flow; they’re called Page overrides, after all! Dorico has to assume that if you’ve created an override, you’ve done so intentionally, and you want to hang onto it.

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Thank you. There is much that is excellent in Dorico but there are some things that are odd and surprising. This is one such.

My view is quite simple. If I delete a flow within a project I expect everything pertaining to it in that project to disappear. I find the explanation as to why this is the case to be too arcane and it implies that the user has to keep rather too many things in mind.

Dorico wanted to mind the pages for you, but you did something that caused an override- ie: you told dorico that what it wants shouldn’t apply, so it leaves those pages alone. There’s nothing arcane about this.

Dorico also does you the favor of coloring in a bright :small_red_triangle: to warn you on the thumbnail of each affected page, so strictly speaking you don’t have to remember; you just have to scan what it’s already reporting back to you.

Indeed it does. But why on earth should I want to keep anything to-do with flows that I have decided to dispense with? Why should it be necessary to study the contents of each and every layout in order to detect whether there are red triangles (and maybe other things besides)? There are many assumptions at play here but I can see that there is an orthodoxy upon which I have trespassed so I will not say any more on this matter.

(For my own edification I may well spend some time constructing an implied entity-relationship (or class) diagram in order to rid myself of the sense that some behaviours are arcane. Don’t worry I’ll keep it to myself. :slightly_smiling_face:)

On the one hand, I totally agree with you, that if something is wiped, in theory you don’t want to see anything that would have pertained to it. That said, it’s not a zero-sum game, and something has to give.

The expectation is that if you’ve made it as far as engrave mode (in theory, the final step before printing, if you’re following the traditional model of music preparation), content, by this point, is fixed, and you’re taking the final steps to prepare to print it.

I don’t think that there is any orthodoxy here to be trespassed upon…

I think you are overlooking the number of use cases different from your own workflow which Dorico has to deal with.
It seems from your OP that you deleted the last flows 21-24. What if you had chosen to delete flow 8-11 instead? Depending on your settings for showing one or many flows/flow headers etc per page, Dorico in any case needs to reset the layout again. And with page overrides tied to specific pages, one really needs to check the red-triangle-regime after performing such an operation.

As @pianoleo mentioned above, there may also be Master Page changes involved. I often use a special MP-pair for front (rh) and back (lh) -cover pages. If I delete individual pages in the middle of the file, I obviously need to check that these Master Pages - which change Dorico’s defaults - still fall correctly.

As @Romanos mentioned, if you don’t override the defaults Dorico will indeed delete your unwanted flows. We haven’t seen your file yet. If we would I am sure the explanation - and the solution - would be obvious.

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I think it’s been mentioned before (and apologies if it was by me), but it would be really convenient to have a way to see what has been overridden on a page.
I had a recent case where I assumed the override was to the upper/lower music margins, but it turned out to be an elongated text frame to accommodate a long project subtitle.

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Imagine creating a work sheet for your students, with several exercises on different pages made up of different flows. You have exlanatory text around, you have graphics on the pages, you have it all. Then imagine wanting to swap/delete or replace one exercise with another. Would you really like Dorico to delete everything on that page? All your texts, graphics?
⇒ Page overrides have nothing to do with flows.

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