One of my Players is typically: the audience, who sing along from a layer I’ve exported from Dorico. Songs may have instrumental intros. These intros show up in my Audience layer as empty bars, or a multi-bar rest.
You know, audiences don’t count bars during intros… Is there any way to have these intros or other tacet bars be completely omitted or skipped for this Player? My current ugly workaround is to delete the tacet bars, Print > Export my Audience layer to pdf, then undo the deletion.
Could you duplicate the flow then delete anything not needed from that one, for your audience part?
I found this thread which might be relevant if it does not seem to duplicate accurately.
Otherwise someone might come up with something more integrated.
Thank you, @arco . Yes, duplicating the flow would work, but, in my opinion, it’s another workaround. One of the nice things about Dorico is having all of your Players’ music, each with their own layout, based on the same music (what you do in Write mode)., and having all Players in one .dorico file. Creating another flow would break the first half of that – Players’ layouts would still be in the same file, but their music would be independent, which means any changes must be manually copied to this other flow.
OK, while playing around with this, I’ve found a better kludge:
This will still leave a head-scrathing bar line, but good enough.
Oops, now what if I change my mind after re-opening the file and want my multi-bar rest back? There is no multi-bar Horizontal bar select! Well, maybe one would need to copy the music to the clipboard in Full Score, delete those bars, insert new empty bars, then paste the music back in, and finally re-make whatever layout adjustments had been made in other layouts.
You could use three flows: one before the Audience starts, the second with the Audience, and the last one if needed when the Audience is done. Make sure there are no flow headings and allow start of flow in the page.
You only tick the second flow for the Audience layout and you’re done!
For my (short) intros to congregational singing, I have used cues in the intro measures, but I sense you wish to keep the audience part as short as possible, which points more to Marc’s flow solution, which I have used to add count-in measures to audio practice files and omit from printed copies.
You could go to the Note Spacing tool then Engrave menu > Note Spacing > reset selected frames to make it reappear (select anything on the page).
Why not just cue the melody line before the audience enters?
Thank y’all for the ideas. I was wondering when I find a use for the Flows feature, which at first seemed to be so annoying to me as a Finale refugee 
I see that the checkbox to which @MarcLarcher refers is in the bottom Properties panel when you are in Setup Mode and select a Layout on the right.
I understand that you cannot have a Flow boundary within a system, however. So in rare cases where there are just a few bars to be omitted, and one does not want a system break in the other layouts, one could use the better kludge that I described in my third post above.