Hi, thanks for your response. You may be right that it is uncommon. However I have seen it before. One such example which comes to mind is the first page in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade:
I suppose you could say it’s basically like a condensed score, where the numbers are listed first, and the instrument names take a pluralization (in Italian plurals with this example). If I could show it this way, I’d be happy to work with separate staves and then condense down to this type of labelling. (Using this example, I might then wish to bracket horns as 6, but with individual staves for every two.)
Either way, I guess then I’m confused even what the point is of having plural names for all the instruments as an option in the name menus. According to a few threads I’ve seen, this has been requested and still not accessible to be used within actual staff labels: