Responsive Score Layouts in Dorico

New Development Diary post over on the Steinberg blog:

A master page definition itself typically consists of a number of frames. Frames are rectangular boxes that can be positioned on a page, and then filled with content. In Dorico, there are three types of frame: music frames, into which the music chosen for your layout is flowed; text frames, into which you can either type arbitrary text, or choose from a number of tokens (sometimes called “wildcards” or “text inserts” in other programs), which are automatically replaced with preset information from elsewhere in your project; and graphics frames, into which you can load images in a variety of formats.

Frames can be positioned anywhere on the page inside the margins defined for the specific page size in use by the layout. All pages in a layout use the same page size, orientation, and margins, but frames can be laid out within those margins differently on every page, if necessary. Frames are defined in a manner that allows the page layout to adapt to changes in page size, orientation, or margins, so that the same master page definitions can be used for e.g. both A4 pages (as typically used in Europe) and Letter pages (as typically used in the United States), or even for A4/Letter and A3/Tabloid. In the language of the modern web, this is known as responsive design, and the behaviour of how a frame’s size and/or position changes when the page size or orientation change is defined in terms of constraints.

The post compares these master pages to their cousins in Adobe InDesign. If you’re not familiar with that, think of master slides in PowerPoint or Keynote. Right now, I’m using a rather silly Sibelius workaround[1] to publish the same score in both a paper and iPad screen format in which I create a “part” for each format that happens to include all of the instruments, thereby creating multiple versions of the same score. I assure you from experience that this way lies madness.

I was just telling a friend yesterday that I expect to work in both Sibelius and Dorico for different projects for the first couple of years as Dorico continues to build its core feature set. But the more I read from Daniel on the development blog, the less I want to spend any time in Sibelius.