I was excited to see you giving us some flexibility with System-attached items visibility. It doesn’t quite rise to the level of functionality of Finale’s “staff lists” as I was hoping, though.
Under the “Specific Players” sections, there should be an “At top of system” setting for each category. Sometimes a score will hide the top staff of the system for lack of music, and as a result, a staff that normally wouldn’t have System Items showing will be at the top.
Even better, it would be great to have a per-item section in the Properties Panel for assignment of a single System Item to particular staves/players on a per-layout basis.
In general, it looks like Dorico will let items “fall down” to the next available staff if a requested staff is hidden. So if I’ve asked for rehearsal marks above the flute player, which is the top staff in a particular score, and that staff is hidden on a certain page, the mark will appear above whatever staff is on top.
Dorico also collapses items if there’s more than one that would normally be displayed. For example, if I want rehearsal marks above flute and oboe and they’re both hidden, Dorico shows a single rehearsal mark above the clarinet.
Here’s another related request for future consideration:
It would be incredibly helpful if you could add specific paragraph styles to the system item assignment categories. Something like the ability to add columns to the table with a dropdown at the top.
My use case would be for Attacca text to appear below the bottom staff. With the new paragraph style options, I can position it perfectly below a staff, but as far as I can tell, there’s no way to make it appear below the bottom staff automatically without affecting other types of system text.
I realize there might be a better solution for attaccas down the line, but I think this could be useful for other scenarios as well.