Okay…so I only post this because I know it would have helped me save some time, but I have to admit that this post is a matter of stating the obvious, so please be polite as I admit what I didn’t know.
So…I was working on my project–lots of odd time signatures in the signature track–and at some point I lost the bars and-beats-markers in the project window itself and also at the header bars-and beats-bar at the top of the project window. The only two bars that remained were the first and the last, but even the beats in those measures had disappeared, and only the bars remained.
I was perplexed as the metronome still hit the 1-beat of every odd-meter measure as it should have (this told me that the metronome was actually reading my signature track and not simply counting out 4/4) and the bars and beats readout next to the play and record buttons in the control bar that I have at the bottom of my project was counting out the correct bars and beats also, but, as I have said, the bars and beats lines and markers were not visible in the project window.
So…here is where I state the obvious, if you haven’t yet guessed what the problem was. What I had apparently done is inadvertently zoomed in to the maximum zoom in the project. In the past, I had always used the “g” and “h” keys to zoom in and out, but I didn’t know that there is now a little slider zoom control at the bottom right of the project window (which I overlooked, probably because I work on a laptop with a relatively small screen–and my vision isn’t the best in the world). I must have accidentally moved the zoom slider with my mouse and zoomed in all the way without knowing it, and the zoom-in was so extreme that the bars and beats simply disappeared.
So…experimenting with the controls on the periphery of the project window, I ended up sliding the little slider I think to the left (it’s just like those in iMovie, if you are familiar with that format) all was back to normal, as this unzoomed my project window.
Now I know that there is an alternative to the keyboard shortcuts for zooming and unzooming. 