Exporting PDFs from Dorico with better filenames

Congratulations! You have managed to overcome the cursed affliction of FBAS (Final Barline Avoidance Syndrome) and have completed your masterpiece. You’ve even prepared all of the parts perfectly, thanks to careful study of Elaine Gould’s book Behind Bars.

Now comes the final step of sending your score and parts to be printed and sent to the performers. Time is of the essence, and so is accuracy. Unlike paper, money doesn’t grow on trees, but you don’t want to waste either one in the course of creating that finished set of materials.

Still, you’re eager to finish this project, and so you may be tempted to quickly export all of the PDFs from a Dorico project without giving a second thought to how the files are produced. After all, whoever is printing it should be able to figure out, right?

Well, not quite. The printer most likely has never seen your piece before, and, unlike you, is unfamiliar with its setup and idiosyncrasies. When I run a print job at NYC Music Services, I’m looking to receive a well-organized set of files that are set up in a logical sequence. Anything that causes me to do a double-take could either delay the process, or, worse, lead to producing an erroneous product that ends up being costly in both time and money.

So, file naming is one of those things that I pay particular attention to. Dorico has a remarkable set of features to assist with producing files that are reliably organized, but you need to know how to finesse the settings to get a consistent set of results.

The basics

The first thing to take note of is that Dorico’s PDF exporting function is located within Print mode, which may or may not be obvious to you, depending upon your frame of reference and familiarity with other software you may have used — sometimes these types of features are located in an “Export”, or “File”, or “Share” menu in other applications.

Once you get to Print mode, you’ll see your layouts — i.e., score(s) and parts — on the left, and printing and exporting options on the right.

The first order of business is one that many Dorico novices (including myself) often overlook: Selecting the layout(s) to which you wish to apply your exporting settings. If nothing is selected, the changes you make will only affect the visible layout in the preview area. This means it’s possible to have different settings for each layout, and even to print some layouts and export others, all in the same operation, and even save these customizations with the document for next time — an incredibly powerful feature.

Today, though, we’re concerned with exporting all PDFs and applying consistent settings to all of them, so we’ll select all of the layouts on the left-hand side. You can Shift-click them or simply select one and hit Cmd/Ctrl+A to select all of the layouts so that they turn blue.

Over in the right-hand panel, in Destination we’ll choose Graphics, and PDF and Mono, but if you wanted other graphic formats, you can choose PNG, SVG, or TIFF. (It’s also possible to print straight to a printer from here, of course, by choosing the Printer option.)

The next step is to choose your destination folder; you can change this by clicking on the ellipsis (…) and navigating to another folder on your computer’s file system. But the excitement starts happening when you choose Filename Options…

From here, you can cook up a “recipe” made of different “ingredients”, or type your own customizations. Dorico’s default recipe is good; $n - $l - $t will return the layout number, layout name, and project title, which is entirely sensible. You may wish to customize further, say, if you want to timestamp your exports, etc.

Whatever you enter here will be used for all layouts in your project, and will also be saved as global preferences for other projects. (If you’re accustomed to Sibelius, where the PDF export filename “recipe” is saved with each project, this is different.)

A helpful preview appears once you move your cursor out of the recipe box, to assist you:

In File names for: be sure you’ve got Portable Document Format (PDF) selected, because you can set the recipe for each of the four file formats individually. If you’ve set a recipe up for PDFs and you’d like to use the same recipe for all of the other formats, click Copy to All.

Once you’ve set that up and click OK to return to the main window, there are even more options under Job Type, Page Setup, and Annotations, which are worth exploring another time. For now, click on Export to export the PDF files to the chosen destination.

Finessing file naming

By default, Dorico will create layouts for the full score and for all of the parts in your project, and will name them according to the instrument name.

When you export all of the layouts of a project with a full score and set of parts with the default recipe, however, you’ll find two files that begin with the number “01”:

If you’re accustomed to Sibelius’s way of numbering exported PDFs, where “00” denotes the score (and, in more recent versions, a score subset), and the parts begin with “01”, Dorico’s way is different. In Dorico, by default, there is a different layout number sequence for each layout type: full scores are numbered independently of part layouts, and those are numbered independently of custom score layouts, if you have such layouts in your project.

This means that, in the above example, the full score is second in the list, after the first part — not ideal. Fortunately, with a little ingenuity, there are a couple of ways to get around this.

Solution 1: Rename the layout

We need to head over to Setup mode. Click on the disclosure arrow on the right edge of the main window to open up the Layouts panel.

Here you’ll see the layout. By clicking on the disclosure arrow next to each layout name, you’ll reveal the layout card for each layout.

Now you can see the reason why the files were named they way they were in the example above.

One easy solution to ensure that the score always appears as the first file in the list would be to simply rename the “SCORE” layout to “_SCORE”, by double-clicking into the card and editing the filename to include a preceding underscore, which takes precedence in alphabetization.

However, this solution won’t be ideal if you’re actually showing the layout name in the full score as the {@layoutname@} token, because now your score will show the same.

Nor does it satisfy the desire to truly have a unique identifying number for every file.

Solution 2: Change the layout numbers (and order)

Dorico is unique in that you can control the order of the layouts and their number, independent of the order in which they appear in the score. Even though by default Dorico will put your layouts in order with the full score at the top and then the parts in score order, you can later arrange them however you like.

In fact, in this example, even though the “KEYBOARD / CONDUCTOR” and “PIANO / VOCAL” layouts were created in Dorico as “Instrumental Part” layouts (instead of “Custom Score” layouts), practically speaking, they’re separate from the instrumental parts and would likely be printed separately from a run of parts. (As you can see, they share the page size, but not the staff size, of the rest of the parts.)

Dorico won’t let you have two of the same layout type with the same number, nor will it allow a value of “0” in the spin box. So, what if we put the scores at the end of the run of parts?

We can do this by first dragging those layout cards to the bottom of the list:

Next, click on any layout card and right-click it, and select Renumber Layouts.

This gives us parts starting with the “GUITAR” part as number 1, through the “CELLO” as number 6. We will deal with the remaining three layouts momentarily…

…for those, let’s number them “100”, “200”, and “300”.

You could really do anything you like here, depending on the nature of your project — for instance, if you had both a transposed score and a concert score in the same project, you could number them “101” and “102” — the point is to easily set this up so that every time you export these PDFs from now on, they’re organized clearly, like with like, ready to send off.

Back in Print mode, our exported PDF files now result as these:

Organizing the files in this manner makes it less likely that the wrong file will be sent to print, and there is no need to remember to manually rename the files after exporting them.

Do you have suggestions or tricks about how you manage this in Dorico? Let me know in the comments.