Hi, please consider adding an option to hide empty staves in galley view. There is the “Hide empty staves: all systems” option that could apply, given that there’s only one system in galley view.
If that option applied, how would you enter any notes at all in a new project, except on the top instrument?
The same way you do it in page view currently. Any of these:
- Disable the option
- Check the relevant player in the “players excluded from hide empty staves” list
- Select some notes and “duplicate to staff below”
- Create a text item on a visible staff, “move to staff above / below”
I’m sure there are other ways that I haven’t thought of yet.
All of those options risk cobbling up the layout of an existing project in Page View.
If this is implemented, might I humbly suggest that Page View and Galley View are kept firmly separate, please?
While a little part of me is sympathetic to the desire to hide empty staves in galley view, this would only be useful if the score was already finished, in which case you might as well just look at a condensed score. The whole point of Galley view is so that everything is available to you for editing, so in a very real ideological sense, hiding empty staves in GV doesn’t make sense at all. It’s like asking a hammer to slice bread. That’s just not what it’s for. I imagine that hiding empty staves in a long scroll view could also be computationally expensive. At least in normal page view there are definite cutoff points and starts and stops. How and where would Dorico decide what to hide? How would you be able to tell when instruments start and stop? What would happen with the vertical layout when instruments drop in and out? All told, it really just doesn’t seem sensible to me.
Are you asking because you want to be able to scroll continuously through your score and not see page breaks?
Multiple staves shouldn’t be a problem: just find an 80" monitor.
I doubt its ever going to be possible to work efficiently on a film orchestral score on a laptop screen (or even a small desktop monitor) unless one is comfortable creating “breakout” layouts for specific instrumental combinations.
I feel lucky to have a 40" (landscape) monitor, but I admit that sometimes I wish I had more height.
That’s not true.
Using “hide empty staves,” I can create a “magic score pad” that only shows me the parts that I have active. To add a new part to the score, I can duplicate a selection of notes to the staff below, or move a text object using “move to staff below” to bring a new staff into view.
This works great in page view, but not in galley view because galley view always shows all staves. So the tradeoff is to use my “magic score pad” in page view, or display a ton of empty, unused staves in galley view, or bounce back and forth between setup and write mode to bring new players in.
I choose to use the magic score pad in page view, but it would be awesome to use it in galley view.
I imagine that hiding empty staves in a long scroll view could also be computationally expensive. At least in normal page view there are definite cutoff points and starts and stops. How and where would Dorico decide what to hide? How would you be able to tell when instruments start and stop?
I’m not asking for something clever like that (wonderful as it would be to define points where Dorico could reconsider a staff’s data).
I’m asking for the simplest possible approach: if the staff is empty, hide it. It’s just one long system.
Are you asking because you want to be able to scroll continuously through your score and not see page breaks?
I’m asking because I want to write in galley view without having a bunch of empty staves, and without having to constantly bounce back and forth between write mode and setup mode to bring new players in, and without having to delete unused staves from grand staves, and without having to manually insert clef signs.
What you said is neat, too.
We do plan to add something like Sibelius’s “focus on staves” or Finale’s “staff sets” feature in future, which I believe would address these requirements adequately.
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I think that would be helpful, so long as I’m able to focus on individual staves of a grand staff. e.g. I have 6 grand staves, I want to select the treble staves from the first 3 and the bass staves from the last 3.
edit: that said, I think that’s still going to entail an undesirable back-and-forth, and that I’d really just like “hide empty staves” in galley view.
Yeah, we’re not going to do hide empty staves in galley view, I’m afraid.
Oops - late to the party. This is great news, I’ve been hoping for something like this for a while. I’ve just watched videos for both of those two functions and I’ve no doubt Dorico’s approach will be a whole lot better.
We do plan to add something like Sibelius’s “focus on staves” or Finale’s “staff sets” feature in future, which I believe would address these requirements adequately.
Daniel, you made my day, I’m longing for this desperately … 
It won’t actually make your day, of course, until it’s implemented, and I’m afraid it’s pretty unlikely it’ll be in our next release, but it’s certainly something that is on our radar for future versions.