Hidden pause produces unexpected results - bug?!

Let me briefly report a strange behaviour with an open measure:
When I first hid the rest at the start of the measure I encountered several problems:

  1. When I tried to move the fermatas horizontally with the hidden rest - this provoked an unintended vertical shifting of staves!
  2. The time sig. disappeared too (the cautionary time sig. however was still displayed:

Pause 1

Pause 2

Finally I succeeded in realizing what I intended by displacing the (unhidden!) rest into the middle of the system and by colouring it white.

Pause 3

However this is not a very elegant workaround …

Why did you need to hide the rests? That’s not the way to do what you need, I’m certain. What are you wanting to achieve?

Wouldn’t nudging the fermata in engrave mode get what you were wanting, without having to resort to option 3?

If vertical shifting occurred, then that means that the floating cautionary meter symbol was what was forcing that stave to move down a bit, and once it was gone (likely attached to the rest position that you then shifted rhythmically rather than visually) the staff spacing was recalculated since it didn’t need to avoid the object that was now gone.

I presume the original poster is doing spatial notation of some type, which is very common in contemporary writing.

Hiding rests in Dorico is generally not a very good idea. Dorico spaces things as if the rest was not there, so when doing spatial notation, if the first half of the measure is blank, Dorico will simply collapse the first visible object back to the beginning of the bar. You could end up with other weird things happening if the spacing algorithms are confused.

Instead, the best approaches are to either scale the rest to 1% size (where it is so tiny you cannot see it) or apply a transparent colour using the alpha channel setting. Making the rest transparent avoids you from having to move it and make it white, it can be left at the default position.

I would also suggest, if possible, to use the rest values to try to get the spacing already mostly correct without having to make manual horizontal adjustments. These horizontal engrave mode adjustments can be easily lost if you go back to make changes to some of the notes. I have had it happen where some quick requested edits wound up destroying the spacing and I did not immediately notice that the spatial representation was wrong.

In this case you would probably get close to the spacing you want by beginning with a sixteenth rest and then having the fermata above a dotted eighth rest, which should give you approximately the spacing you want without having to resort to manually shifting things horizontally in engrave mode. After that, take those rests and instead of hiding them, make them 1% size or transparent with the alpha channel. As I stated above, I’ve learned the hard way that edits can undo all of that hard work and then I have to shift things all over again.

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Why not just add space before the first chord using the note spacing tool?

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I wanted to achieve the result of picture Nr. 3.

Adding space using the note spacing tool can be easily undone if edits are made to that passage in write mode. Or you can get into a situation where the score looks correct but not the part, or vice versa. Depending on the edit made in write mode and what else is in the score, you could end up losing that space in the part but not in the score for instance. Those types of issues are not always easy to catch on a proofread since you aren’t used to looking for them.

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Thank you for your instructions, the hint to reduce the trancparency of elements to 0 was the clue to me.

Sorry, but I am not experienced enough to know what the “floating cautionary meter symbol” is.
Even if I found a solution to my problem without hiding rests I don’t understand why staves move downwards if an initial rest of a measure is hidden and if I move an element horizontally. I consider this to be a bug.

I was speaking of the ‘X’ indicating open meter.

If the X disappears, dorico doesn’t need to leave space for it anymore, so it recalculated the vertical spacing, and the staves moved. It is intended behavior.