Hiding / Unhiding staves

[steveparker]

I don’t think it’s possible to cover all cases automatically. Hopefully sooner or later we’ll be able to select a stave and hide it.

[Off_The_Fence]

@MarcLarcher

Have you tried to input some blank text (space bar) attached to the rests of the hidden staves with shift X or alt shift X ? The bars would not be empty anymore… The problem is that, in the parts, it would break your multibar rests. So not an ideal workaround, sorry.

Mark! Thank you for an easy, elegant workaround to get the staves to appear in an unusual situation. It worked like a charm for me in an open choral score situation.

[JesterMusician]

Behind Bars provides the following exceptions to blanking staves (p. 522-523):

It is better to fill out short systems with some blank staves, so as to balance the number of staves on a facing page, rather than suddenly to shorten the page depth. Likewise, the distance between systems should not be too large: a page looks unbalanced with too much blank space in the middle.

The tacet staves to include are those of a performer who has just finished, who is about to re-enter or who is tacet for only a few systems. However, do not include copious numbers of blank staves as these are distracting, as are staves that enter and disappear at random.

Sometimes it is useful to retain blank staves so that the position of a performer remains on the same horizontal level across facing (or between neighbouring) pages. (This is helpful for the conductor.) For example, where fewer staves are required for only a few bars but the system cannot be reduced sufficiently to fit two systems onto a page, retain a tacet string section, so that the stave levels of other instruments do not change too abruptly from page to page.

There are several potential software solutions to this problem, some more automatic than others. For user intervention, there would need to be a way to define explicit showing (or hiding) of extra staves - perhaps it could be as simple as the ability to place a marker to force showing that staff in that measure (and consequently the whole staff for that system). From there, a script could calculate which measures should have this marker, and then apply it to expand the systems appropriately.

However, such a script would need to be re-executed every time the layout changes, which isn’t the Dorico way.

In my opinion, Dorico should perform vertical space-saving in the following order:

1. Condense same-instrument staves.
2. Hide tacet individual staves or tacet staff groups.
3. If a page is now underfilled, try to fit the next system on it.
4. In the last system added, unhide staves in order of next entrance (or according to a points system based on time to next entrance and time since last exit), until the page is filled. This effectively alerts the conductor of an upcoming entrance in the following system.
5. If the page only has one system, and it is still overfilled, reduce stave size very slightly.

This space-saving algorithm does not consider moving measures to adjacent systems to save space, but otherwise I think it should perform quite well. Each of these steps could be considered optional and configurable in the Layout settings. For example, if a conductor prefers to have one system per page, the user can disable the 3rd step, so automatic condensation and hiding can be done where suitable. In addition, the user should be able to specify which staves should be considered a group for hiding purposes, and only hide it if none of the instruments in the group are playing. (SATB, strings, etc.)

Of course, I do not know how compatible such a solution is with Dorico’s layout system. Regardless of the implementation, I look forward to new and improved staff hiding features!

[clowergen]

@Stephen Taylor

Earlier this year I wrote the first movement of a piece for cello and chamber orchestra, which has two long cello cadenzas. For most of the piece, I want to show every instrument staff even if they’re resting, to avoid problems like GLFLieger’s screenshot above; also, some conductors prefer to have the same instrument shown in the same spot, page after page. It helps when you’re studying a score to know the harp is always halfway down, etc. etc.

Anyway, in order to do that, I had to show every player, even during cello cadenzas; this used lots of extra pages. So I agree with folks above, hiding staves would be nice to have. I would have hidden them during the cello cadenzas, and then shown them for the rest of the piece.

I think this is a very valid reason to need a function like this. Did you figure it out?

[Stephen_Taylor]

I just showed all the players, all the time, even in cadenzas. When I conducted it I clipped the cadenza pages together, so I could turn them all at once.

It might be possible to solve this issue with separate flows; I think I tried, but I didn’t get very far and I was running out of time.

[Derrek]

It goes without saying that one could use a separate flow for the cello cadenza, depending how you have organized the rest of your composition.

[Stephen_Taylor]

Yes, you certainly could use flows. One reason I didn’t is because the cadenza takes, say 5 systems, not enough to fill a page. Then once the orchestra enters again, only the strings are playing. So if I could have temporarily hidden the winds, I could have had a page with both the cadenza and the following orchestra entrance. It didn’t seem worth it to have one page with mostly white space. And there are a couple of cadenzas, so the piece would have had at least four flows, and if I made any revisions it would get messy very quickly.

[Rob_Tuley]

Flows don’t have to start on a new page.

But without the actual project (or a least a page or two before and after the cadenza) it’s hard to make any definite suggestions.