Layouts in Dorico

Layouts define how music for one or more players in one or more flows is presented, including page size, margins, staff size, and so on.

Layouts combine musical content, as represented by flows, with rules for page layout and music engraving. As well as part layouts for individual players, you can have layouts for multiple players drawn from multiple different flows. You can use the layouts to produce paginated music notation that can be printed or exported in various formats.

A typical project for an ensemble of multiple players contains several layouts. For example, a work for string quartet in three movements contains four solo players – two violins, one viola, and one cello – and three flows, one for each movement. Such a project might require five layouts:

  • Four layouts each containing the music from all three flows for one of the solo players, that is, the individual instrumental parts

  • One layout containing the music from all three flows and all four players, that is, the full score

Each layout provides independent control over practically every aspect of the visual appearance of the music, including independent staff size, note spacing, and system formatting.

Each layout can have independent page layout properties, such as page size, margins, running headers, and footers. These can be defined as master pages and then be applied freely to left- or right-hand pages or to specific pages in a layout, for example, the first or last page.

Flow frames define where music appears on each page. One or more flows are assigned to each flow frame, in a manner analogous to how flows of text are assigned to text frames in desktop publishing applications. Dorico also provides for text frames, which allow the presentation of blocks of text, such as prefatory material, critical commentary, and block lyrics.

Note

The page layout features of Dorico allow you to have multiple flow frames and text frames on the same page. This enables you to combine music from multiple flows on the same page.