Engrave help please for novice! Inputting rest-free senza misura to existing score

Hi. I have an existing 190 bar score into which I want to insert a separate senza misura bar in 4 different places. The senza misura notation contains non-standard noteheads. I can do this after a fashion, and it looks fine on Galley view, but Page View freaks out and I get loads of mad scribble displaying when I print. What I want to produce in senza misura has dotted arrowed lines to show sequencing of instruments but ideally I also want to remove all rests as well as barlines in each of those 4 bars. Can anyone point me to a resource that will help me, please? (This is the first and last time I shall attempt a senza misura passage on Dorico!)

Can you show us the mad scribble? A visual image of what you have helps to work out what you’re trying to achieve.

Normally, Dorico handles senza misura passages very easily, so perhaps the only problem here is inserting them into the middle of an existing layout.

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Not sure if these links will work? Here we go.
Galley view is fine!

Engrave mode

That’s the classic sign of a System (or Frame) Break set to “Wait for Next Break”, when there isn’t another break for bars and bars.

If you’re not sure how to get out of this mess, you can click Reset Layout in the left-hand panel (or choose Engrave > Format Music Frames > Reset Layout if you don’t see the panel) to remove all breaks and get back to a known good starting point for further formatting.

Oh my life! That’s worked really well, thank you! Now all I have to do is work out how to delete all the rests in senza misura bars without all the notes in different staves moving left!

Can you post a screenshot? Usually if you want to be safe and not have anything move, you can set the rests to be transparent, so they’re invisible.

Wherever you have notes on every beat, you can just hide the rests and it won’t ruin the spacing. You can select a whole passage at once and Hide Rests will operate only on the rests.

Thanks all. Here is what I am trying to replicate but I don’t know how to hide the rests without changing the spacing of the existing notes (it’s a semi-operatic piece with voice and 2 pianos)

select the rests, and set the transparency to 0 in the properties panel.

Sorry, Dan, I’ve looked in properties on both Write and Engrave but I can’t see anything called Transparency?

It’s in the colour property, called alpha channel on PC and opacity on mac.

Thanks Dan and Marc, that’s so helpful. Cheers!