I am aware that sometimes you want to hide a staff that has music on it, so you can play back something that you don’t want to see in the score.
However, I’m finding that I’m having some staves hidden that have music on them when I’ve hidden an empty staff earlier in a movement. Is there any way to force Dorico to show ALL staves with music on them, or at least signal when there are hidden staves with music on them?
No, I’m afraid not. As soon as you start manually adding and removing staves you’re fully on your own, admin-wise. I would certainly welcome some way of auto-signaling those spots in a future update.
Dorico does not hide staves containing music by default unless YOU applied a Manual Staff Visibility change. This is indicated by a purple signpost. To show signposts select menu View > Signposts > Show Signposts.
In Galley View all staves are shown always regardless of Manual Staff Visibility changes.
Yes, Vadian. But people make mistakes. If I chose to show an empty staff on one page and then hide it on the next, instead of reset, then how do I know that I’ve hidden a whole bunch of music? That is my point. It takes so long to go back and forth between page and galley view after you turn on hiding and condensing that checking all the signposts is very time consuming. I might as well delete them all and start over.
Don’t forget that in Write mode, there’s also Add Staff Above/Below commands for solo players, and divisi changes for section players. Both can be deleted without deleting the underlying music, and Galley view can’t help you then.
In Page View double-clicking the signpost opens the Manual Staff Visibility dialog window.
I only apply hiding towards the end of the layout process, and I “work backwards”. So I always apply a “Reset” System Break before I add the Hiding one.
I do the same with divisi: if I’ve typed it in with divisi throughout, then I’ll add more divisi signposts, from the back to the front, to avoid losing anything when I add the unisons in.
The problem that I find with working backwards is that sometimes I need to shift the layout, in the case that shifting a bar forwards might change what staves I need to hide to optimize the layout.
Is there a way to hide music that contains music?
For example, if I’m a lyricist for a song, and notated some piano part, but want to hide my staves until the composer takes a crack at the song?
I’m attaching a file here. I want to hide my “LYR” piano part.
You can hide any staves you want, with a manual visibility change.
But note that this only affects page view and Engrave mode. In your case, you might be better off excluding your piano player from the full score layout (in Setup mode), or creating a new layout without that player.
If you’ll please look at the file, I’m currently using it on, but it isn’t working as I know it to have in the past.
Why would I exclude the player from the lead sheet layout? It’s a part of a 32-piece project already. I’d rather Manual Visibility Change work as it should.
Someone smarter than me can figure out why the manual staff visibility change doesn’t seem to be taking effect. But in the meantime, if you delete that signpost and then remove the LYR player from the lead sheet layout, those staves will be hidden in all views, which I thought is what you wanted – hiding your piano part until the composer has had a try.
Unfortunately manual staff visibility will only take effect in page view, so the composer could still still easily view your staves when switching to galley view, if that’s ok.
In any case it appears the issue is that you didn’t have a Full Score layout (under layouts in the setup page). I don’t know why manual staff visiblity doesn’t work for parts but only for full score layouts, that’s a question for the team. I added it for you and reset LYR to be hidden, which now works:
08. In My Own Words - Lead Sheet - updated.dorico (919.0 KB)
Ahhh, so that’s what it is. Thank you, @wing!
I’ve got engraving in the flows surrounding it that I don’t want to let use.
Thanks, @wing – I missed that!
It was a real head scratcher to me as well! I actually didn’t know about it until trying with this project (since I always do have a full score layout) – so this quirk is news to me, now we know 
Might @Janus or @dspreadbury be able to advise?
I’m not completely sure what’s going on, but if you change the Hide empty staves option on the Vertical Spacing page of Layout Options from All Systems to After first system, the manual staff visibility change will take effect as you expect.
Wow! A nice compliment to @Janus here! Congrats.
