I’m writing a piece for percussion with free rhythms so I try to get rid of all rests and let the player play by the visual relationships of the notes. On a normal stave I can change the colour of the rests to transparent, however, that doesn’t affect the dots if the rest is dotted. What I then do is to set the custom scale property to 1 and the dots disappear. Neither of these hacks works on the grid though (while doing the same changes to notes works as expected), not even if they are hidden when displayed as single line instruments. In grid view, the rests always show up with the default settings.
This is both a bug report and a question if someone knows of a workaround.
I’m sorry to say that it is expected that you can neither hide via Remove Rests nor via editing the colour property, for technical reasons. I’m not sure I can think of a good workaround at the moment.
For whole rests (whole note rests? Not sure of the english name) you can just enter a whole note and mute it, then scale it down or change the colour.
If you want to hide a quarter rest, you can add a 4:1 ratio tuplet and enter a whole note, then you can scale down the “4” and the whole note or hide it using the colour property.
Edit: I realized that I didn’t really read your post thoroughly, but you should be able to change the dotted rests into normal rests using force duration, and then use the workaround I suggested. It’s not a very fast way, but it should get it done.
Unless I’m totally wrong on the subject, I’m afraid unpitched percussion does not handle explicit rests at all — it’s a very different handling than any other instrument in Dorico, because there’s another level of abstraction in unpitched notation (that we might well see in automatic reduction/expansion in the years to come…). Therefore I do not think you can use force duration on rests in unpitched percussion at all.
If all you want to do is to hide them though, you can still change the rests to notes, mute the notes and hide them using the workaround you mentioned.
If you want to hide quarter rests for instance though, you can use tuplets to change to whole notes within that tuplet and hide everything.
If I misunderstood what you want to achieve, feel free to attach a drawing of what you want it to look like!