hi there,
I’m working on an orchestral score and have selected for Dorico to “hide empty staves” after the first system as well as hide individual empty staves for multi-stave instruments.
However – I have a problem because this score has marimba, celesta and harp, whose empty staves take up a lot of room on the first system… and I’d love to hide one of their empty staves on the first page.
How can I work with exceptions to the “hide empty staves” rule on a page-by-page basis?
Thanks!
There is currently no direct way to make exceptions to Hide Empty Staves. As a workaround, use shift-X text to make an empty text box (with a space, for example). That will cause a staff not to be hidden; the empty text will be marked with a signpost. Then you can set Hide Empty Staves to the entire score, including the first page.
that was a great suggestion - thank you!
… however, this does not entirely solve my problem, as I still have clashing staves on the first system… and nowhere else in the score.
Is there a chance to have different size staves on the first page rather than on the others? or is it more of a matter of exporting two PDFs and then merging?
AFAIK there are two different conventions. Either you have a text page listing all the instrumentation and the first music page can then have hidden staves, or you show the complete instrumentation on the first music page .
You could reduce the staff size a bit on just the first page to display all the staves. Add a system break at the start of the score and change the staff size with the properties panel.
Unless your title takes a lot of space on the first page, you will probably hit the same vertical space problem later on in a tutti passage when you need all the staves. You could create a separate title page to make more space on the first music page, of course.
that’s also wise, Rob, thank you!