I need two layouts of the same part: one with chord symbols, one without. However, since show/hide chords is a property of the player rather than the layout, I don’t think that this is possible.
I’m writing a sheet for a choir. The conductor wants chord symbols above the top staff in order to provide some guide piano during rehearsal (w/o wasting space for an extra piano stave). The choir need not see the chord symbols.
Of course, if we had staves with zero lines, I might just let an “invisible” instrument display the chords, and add it to the first layout, but not to the second.
I’ve not tried this, but I wonder whether it would work: in Setup mode, set the chord symbols not to appear for whatever is the top player (soprano presumably), so that chord symbols don’t appear at all by default: then in the layout in which you want the chord symbols to appear, set the ‘Show chord symbols’ option to ‘Above top staff of system’ on the Staves and Systems page of Layout Options.
What’s too bad about this is that it works! But, it breaks multirests as opposed to what happens when we hide them from a player that is setup to display chords.