Master pages and tokens

Although you can only edit and use master pages and text tokens fully in Dorico Pro, it is worth understanding the basic principles of how Dorico uses them to display information on pages, regardless of your product version.

When you added information in Project Info, that information automatically appeared in the music. This affected the following information:

1. Project title

2. Flow heading, displaying the number and title of Flow 1

3. Project composer

4. Running header, displaying the title of Flow 1

The flow heading and running header both refer to the flow title, rather than the project title, so that they can update automatically according to the nearest flow below them. If your project contained four flows, for example, this means you could use the same page formatting on all pages and the flow titles always refer to the relevant flow.

Dorico achieves this by using text tokens that refer to fields in Project Info. Text tokens automatically populate with the corresponding information, such as flow titles or layout names. You might also know them as “wildcards”.

In Dorico Pro, the green text frames on the default master pages that contain these tokens are shown when you switch to Engrave mode:

Master pages function like templates in Dorico, allowing the same page formatting to be applied to multiple different pages and in different layouts. All pages in your scores and parts inherit their page formats from master pages. Whenever you create or change anything on master pages, this is automatically reflected on the pages that use these master pages.

The project title and composer are both on the First master page. The running header is on the Default master page. The flow heading is shown above the first system in the flow, inside the music frame.

If you enter the top text frame on page 1, by either double-clicking it or selecting the edge and pressing Return, the token that populates with the project title is shown: