I’d like to see manual staff visibility be a little smarter about changes I make in Setup mode.
I create a score for flute and Bb clarinet, enter all the music, work on the layout. At one point, I enter a manual staff visibility change and hide the clarinet, and then reset visibility a couple of systems later.
Later on, I realize that the part sits better for A clarinet, so I go back to Setup mode and change the Bb clarinet instrument to A clarinet. Now the clarinet part is visible again in the entire score, because I told Dorico I wanted to hide Bb clarinet, not A clarinet. I kind of understand this, but at the same time, what I really thought I was telling Dorico was to hide the staff that contains the music which happens to be for Bb clarinet; the fact that I’ve now assigned the same music, in the same staff, to A clarinet shouldn’t change the staff visibility.
Let’s back up and say I try to work around this by editing the instrument definition, rather than changing the assigned instrument. So in Setup mode, I edit the instrument definition for Bb clarinet, and I change the transposition of that instrument so that it’s really in A. Same result: this staff is again visible everywhere, even though the staff still belongs to the original instrument. The same thing seems to happen if I make any change to the definition of an instrument whose music is on a manually hidden staff.
In reality, this happened to me in a long score with multiple manual staff visibility changes. I didn’t initially realize what had happened; what I saw was that text frames I had added to pages later in the score were showing up on the wrong pages, and I eventually figured out that changes to staff visibility somewhere in the middle had altered the distribution of music in frames and hence the downstream pagination.