How to Use Frames in Dorico | Engrave mode

🎬  This article is a transcription of one of the excellent tutorial videos posted to the official Dorico YouTube channel.

Presented here in written form with the kind permission of its creator, Anthony Hughes, this tutorial is titled “How to Make Edits to Music Items in Dorico”…

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Hi I’m Anthony Hughes, and in this video I’ll be giving you an introduction to music, text and graphics frames here in Steinberg’s new music notation software, Dorico.

Dorico has an extremely powerful page layout system built into it. A key concept to understand in order to start learning about this is that all objects in a layout are stored within frames. There are three types of frame: music frames which is where all of the music notation is displayed;

text frames, for creating titles and page numbers and other text not directly linked to the music;

and graphics frames, that allow you to add jpegs, pngs and svgs to your layouts.

When you switch to Engrave mode—which you can do easily by using the key command Ctrl+3 on Windows, or Cmd+3 on Mac—you can see the frames used on each page in your layout. They are coloured blue for music frames, green for text frames and pink for graphics frames.

In order to protect you against making unwanted changes to frames while you work with other features, frame editing is disabled until you turn on this switch in the Frames section.

Now frame editing is enabled, you can click on a frame to select it, and move it to a new position. And you can use the handles to change the size and shape of the frames.

These buttons at the top of the panel are for creating new frames. Simply click the desired button and then drag out the frame on the page.

By default, Dorico will set up a frame chain that flows all of the music that is included in that layout through as many frames on as many pages as are needed. This means if I make this music frame smaller than is required to show all of the music, Dorico will automatically create a new page for me and continue the frame chain to show all of the music.

The reverse is true: if I now increase the size of this music frame, the second page is no longer required and so is automatically removed.

Text frames allow you to type freely, or paste in text from other applications, and has comprehensive tools for formatting that text.

To add a graphic, create a new graphics frame and then double-click to choose an image file with which to fill it.

Frames can overlap each other allowing you to format your page exactly how you like.

If this video has been helpful to you please consider liking it by clicking on the thumbs up button, and you can subscribe to our Dorico channel to see many more videos like this one. I’m Anthony Hughes, thanks for watching.

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