I noticed, while editing a whole vocal score from Offenbach, that sometimes (I mean, in some flows) the first staff of the singer that starts the flow is hidden in the first system (which is fine, since it is empty and it is what I want…) and sometimes not ! In those latter cases, I try to delete everything that could be linked to that staff, in order to get things right, but I cannot achieve my goal. Could you send me some tips (if you think of something) ?
In order to make this investigation a little bit easier, I send you some pictures of the faulty pages.
Of course, in Layout options, I have chosen the right option : always hide empty staves.
Have you imported from xml? Sometimes, underlying information from xml prevents Dorico from hiding staves. When it happened to me, it had to do with the time signature. I deleted and re-entered it, and the stave disappeared as expected.
Actually, I had the answer to my problem from Daniel : I started writing that score thinking that Georget was a tenor, hence with a tenor G clef (with a low 8).
Then I learned it was a soprano singing a young male role, so I changed the clef. That was the problem. Removing the clef removed the “empty” bars. I just had to change the instrument (from tenor to soprano), move all the notes an octave higher and this was it.
Interesting! I thought I’d tried that, but it turns out my use of ‘invisible’ clefs was holding me up.
I’d popped back into this thread to post the attached image of two staves showing at the exact same place when only one should appear. Then I tried messing about with the clefs, and it solved the problem. I was using the “invisible” command for clefs. In order to ‘delete’ the invisible clef I had to create a visible clef (presumably to override it somewhere in the bowels of the system), and then delete THAT, which restored the ‘default’ clef and allowed the staff to be hidden.
To keep my invisible clef situation going, I just went to when the instrument actually enters and put the invisible clef there instead. Which, as usual when you figure out the right way to work with Dorico, really makes more sense if you think about it.
Re-training my brain from almost twenty years of Finale’s interface/affordances/schema/data model is not a fast process, but it is a pretty fun one.
I have also run into the problem of duplicate (hidden) clefs from XML imports preventing the staves from hidden. Once those clefs are deleted, everything functions as normal. Frustrating problem until one stumbles on the solution though (and remembers it for future projects).
