What Determines the Image Area of a Flow's Graphic Export?

Dorico
1

I’m trying to figure out what determines the equivalent of Adobe’s “bounding box” when exporting music examples from Dorico. I have experimented with changing both page margins and flow margins, but I get the same result, which is a lot of padding above when imported into InDesign. For my purposes, I would like to be able to remove any padding around each export. I’ll try exporting to SVG and see what happens, but I am leary of using a format that doesn’t embed fonts.

2

I have found this works totally predictably for me exporting slices as PDF. Can you show what you mean?

3

With InDesign, a graphic import has two bounding boxes: the import box, which can be whatever size you set in InDesign, and the box that is the boundary of the graphic itself (kind of like the art board). InDesign will automatically size the import box to the graphic box, which can be very helpful if the graphic box doesn’t have a lot of white space around the graphic—for spacing and aligning, etc. in InDesign.
The PDFs I’m getting from Dorico tend to have a lot of white space around them, especially above.

4

Odd… the PDFs I export always use exactly the boundaries I create in the graphic slice tool. I import into IDD all the time.

5

Are you printing PDF files or using the graphic slice tool in Engrave mode to import into InDesign? I use Scribus (same principle) and graphic slices from Dorico work just fine. I think you’d be better off using the graphic slice tool. If I understand print mode, it either prints the entire page or the page width (depending on your choice). In that case you’d end up with extra white space.

6

I’ll try graphic slice. I have to look that up first, but I’ll let you know how it works for me. Thanks for the tip, Dan!

7

Thank you, James. I haven’t tried it that way. I have various layouts for examples in the same Dorico file, and when I do corrections it’s nice that I can print them to PDF and update them in InDesign in just a few seconds. I’ll see what creating a graphic slice involves.

8

Figured it out. Yes, this will work much better! Thank you!

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