Notation Express and XL for Dorico 5 add lots of new buttons and features to support many of the newer features in Dorico.

Notation Express and XL for Dorico 5 add lots of new buttons and features to support many of the newer features in Dorico.
In music scores and parts, page numbers and headers are some of the most underappreciated and overlooked elements of what appears on the page. When you stop to think about it, it’s no mystery why that’s the case.
Perfect page layout is essential to creating quality output from music notation software. Finale offers a multitude of options to format the music on the page, but understanding where the options are is important in the quest to conquer Finale.
Here’s a video tutorial, with a complete transcript, from Thomas Goss of Orchestration Online on the subject of correctly labeling instrument names and numbers in your score, and its importance to the orchestra staff and librarian.
Before you do any work on parts, you’ll want to get one basic parameter from the librarian: the paper size their orchestra prefers for their instrument parts. Here’s a video tutorial from Thomas Goss of Orchestration Online on the subject, with a complete transcript.
Here’s a solution to correct when a cautionary time signature is uncomfortably hanging outside the edge of the page margin in Sibelius.
In Sibelius, when working in a file with a score and parts, you can unintentionally break the link between the wildcards used for title and composer text. It can cause a whale of a problem, but fortunately there’s a way to escape.
Managing properties of objects in Dorico is powerful and flexible. You can change properties in two modes: a global mode where the properties are immediately propagated, and a local mode where they are set in the active layout only.
Dorico supports creating empty staves either at the end of a part layout — sometimes referred to as “Hollywood-style” parts — or simply in order to create custom manuscript paper.
Dorico has a tool called Manual Staff Visibility which allows the user to easily hide or show staves throughout a score, to mitigate instances where a page will show too much white space as a result. Learn how to use it in your score.