Hide Empty Staves – different setting for first flow to subsequent flows

Hi,
I might be asking a wider question here – which is whether any Setup->Layout Options can be flow specific, I guess they can’t.
What I would like is Hide Empty Staves to be set to ‘After first system’ for the first flow in my project, but ‘All systems’ for the remaining flows (movements).
Am I correct in saying this isn’t currently possible, and I would have to do a workaround such as setting it to ‘All systems’ but then creating invisible objects (such as blank spaces) on the staves I want to keep shown in the first flow?
Thanks everyone!

No, at the moment this can’t vary by flow by way of the Layout Options dialog, but you can use the new Manual Staff Visibility Change dialog added in Dorico 3.5 to achieve this as needed.

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Thanks, that works great!

Follow-on question: I have staff labels set to first system ‘Full’, subsequent systems ‘None’, on the full score layout of a piano quintet.
There are a couple of places in the flow where I do actually want a label to appear on a particular staff, the strings have been tacet for some time and then there is a violin 2 entry. However because of staff labels setting there’s no way of telling whether it’s a violin 1 or 2 (or one of the other string players in a high register :wink:). So far, I’ve come up with two options:

  • a workaround, using Shift-X text on that staff and set it so it is visible in the full score layout only?
  • manual system break and set staff labels in the properties panel. However this shows instrument names on all staves, whereas I only want to label any ‘ambiguous’ staves

Thanks!

I think probably using Shift+X text is the simplest way to approach this.

Another approach would be to assign new instruments to the player whose names are empty strings (specified in the Edit Instrument Names dialog) and then switch to those instruments (by writing music for them rather than the original ones) for the affected passage, but you will still need to hide the instrument change labels and warnings that will appear at the point where the instrument change.

Thanks Daniel, I’ll give this a shot!