When I make a frame break than I see an unwanted effect on following overrides. In the example there is an override on page 3 (“last page”). If I make a frame break on page 2 then the override remains on page 3, although we now have 4 pages and the overrides should move to the next page (page 4). A solution is to include a page before page 3, this is clear. However, this page will have again overrides (which I can delete). Why doesn’t Dorico handle these things automatically? In a little document like this example this is not a problem, but think of a project with many flows and many overrides. Am I missing something?
Something quite important to understand is that there is no anchor between the pages — or page numbers or overridden pages — and the content of the music. No matter what, Dorico will make your music fit somewhere, so if Dorico finds that there is not enough space, it will add a page.
I find it not very easy to play with the options offered by Dorico with frames, pages overrides… because actually it is a very complex field!!! Different users may want to use those in very different ways and Dorico cannot “guess” for the user. Which means that each step must be carefully thought after.
I think this is a field where an extended video lesson could be useful — although some very good ones are out there (thanks John Barron and Anthony Hughes)
Marc is absolutely right that the overrides in page layout are not linked to the music at all: the music flows through the music frames independently of what pages they happen to be on.
Ant’s next big video project is a series of videos going into Dorico’s page layout features in greater detail, and we hope these will be ready by the end of the summer.
Sorry Daniel, I am not satisfied with your answer. In my posted example there are 3 flows on 3 pages. Then I make the frame break on page 2 and - not surprisingly - now I have 4 pages. Because the override in page 3 doesn’t automatically move to the next page (why not?) I insert a page after page 2. And now the override moves - as wanted - to page 4. Interesting: althoug I inserted a new page there are still 4 pages, not 5 (again: why?). This looks all a little bit strange to me. With Adobe InDesign I never had such anomalies.
The reason you don’t see these anomalies in Adobe InDesign is because InDesign never automatically crates pages in order to make sure that all of the content that might be lurking in any of the chains of text frames in your document actually appears, whereas Dorico has to do this automatically. I don’t think people would in general be too happy if they had to manually add pages and either assign master pages or drag out new music frames for every page of music, which is effectively what you have to do in InDesign when you have content that overflows an existing page.
So this automatic behaviour and the need to allow you to override it on a page-by-page basis results in some conflicts and can result in you essentially fighting against the automatic behaviour.
When you make a frame break, this does not cause the page override to move: it just causes the music to flow through the frames differently, and any extra pages required to ensure the music is fully displayed will be added at the end of the layout, not at the position where you added the frame break.
Thank you for clarification. I see, this is all by design. But is it really a reasonable design?
This decision:
is hardly understandable by me. Why not exactly at this position?
I made another experiment, a project with 2 flows, the second flow with an override. The music In the first flow fits on two pages. Now I changed the rastral size for the complete project from 7 to 8, so that the music in flow 1 no longer fits on two pages. So Dorico added extra pages at the end of the layout and the override of the last page moved backward. In Engrave mode I selected the page with the override and moved it to the end of the layout - and all looks okay. So my question: when me stupid user can do it by hand, why can’t Dorico do it automatically or for my sake by function?
How is Dorico supposed to know whether or not you want the override to move? There are just as many circumstances in which you would not want the override to move when the music reflows as when you would want it to move, and, as I say, the page layout world has no knowledge of what bars of music are in any particular frame, which is as it should be, and indeed as it is in other page layout programs, like InDesign. If you add more words to a story in InDesign such that it requires a new page, InDesign certainly does not automatically insert a new page and then shuffle all of the rest of your content around (unless it has changed dramatically since I last used it, which I doubt).
If this is true than many apologies …
May be I am missing here something, I can’t think of such circumstances. Can you give an example?
More or less any fixed kind of layout that mixes text and music would qualify, I think. If you have a layout involving multiple frames appearing on the same page, you would not want Dorico to start shuffling this around.
This is very abstract … I know, your time is limited. But a small, little real life example would be extremly helpful. Maybe another user with more knowledge in layout questions as me could help?
Think about a worksheet or an exam paper, where most of the questions have one text frame and one music frame, but some questions might use more frames (for example there might be one music frame for the question, and another one with blank staves for the student’s answer).
If you change the first question, on the sheet , you don’t want Dorico to try to reformat all the other questions for you, though you might have to reformat some of them yourself to get sensible page breaks etc (You probably wouldn’t want the start of a question on one page and the end on the next page, etc).
Thank you, Rob, for the example. I think in this case one can only use layout music frames and Dorico will not add page breaks by himself, even if one makes a frame break in a layout music frame. All this is left to the user, so this is not the problem here. We need an example with master music frames.
Imagine a critical or performing edition that has extensive footnotes at the bottom of several pages. In such a case, you would certainly use a regular master page frame chain for the main body of the music, and layout-specific text frames for source descriptions or performance instructions. This content may not be tied to specific bars in the music, or they may be tied to a bar that is near the beginning of the page of music, and so a change in pagination due to some editing should not necessarily cause this material to move onto the next page.
Regardless of whether you find this a convincing use case, the fact is that the positioning of page overrides, master page changes, page number changes and the like is independent of the musical content flowed into the music frames on each pages. That’s how things will stay.
To my experience footnotes are mostly dependend on any special bars, not only on bars which are near the beginning of a page. So if Dorico will stay by the current behavior there will be the same problems as described here and in other threads. As you suspected - I am not convinced by your example.
Generally, most elements in a score are indeed depending on special rhythmic positions. Hence, in my opinion Dorico should reflect this and treat the rare exceptions as that what they are: exceptions (for example include a flag that shows wether this element should be shuffled by page operations or not). Perhaps it is possible to extend the engrave mode with note dependend text and graphic frames.