I am also not able to hide unused staves the way I need to, and the commands do not seem to work as labeled.
When I use the Vertical Spacing setting to hide all unused staves (which takes too many clicks to get to, BTW, way to reminiscent of the nested dialog boxes in Finale that I always hated), it only hides them after the first system, not from the very beginning. Setting it to hide all unused staves and all after the first system gives me the exact same result.
I cannot figure out how to hide unused staves in some systems and not in others, either. In a choral score, where sometimes the multipart writing is best when condensed to a single staff and sometimes best when expanded to multiple staves, this is essential.
Reg
Presumably your score was imported via MusicXML? If so, select the clefs at the very start of the flow on the staves that you want to be hidden and delete them: don’t worry, the default clefs of the instruments will be left behind when you do so. At that point, Dorico should be able to hide those staves as well.
This happens because Dorico always creates explicit clefs at the start of the flow, even if the clef specified in the MusicXML file is the same as the default clef that would otherwise be used for that type of instrument. We hope to change this such that Dorico doesn’t create the redundant clef in this situation in future.
Aha! That works, thanks!
What about the thing of hiding staves in some systems and not others? I can’t make a presentable choral score without that feature. The score I am using has unison passages, two and three part homophonic passages, and two and three part polyphonic passages. Sometimes I need to show that on a single staff, sometimes on two, and sometimes on three.
It’s possible to produce a choral score where the number of staves changes from system to system in Dorico in much the same unsatisfactory way it’s possible in other scoring programs. You’ll need duplicate players, e.g. for Soprano and Alto together, and for Tenor and Bass together, and then you’ll have to insert system breaks at the points where you need to hide one pair of staves in order to show the combined staff, etc. etc.
The long-term plan is for Dorico to be able to handle this kind of layout completely automatically, where you simply have all four voice parts as separate players, and Dorico can then dynamically produce the appropriate score layout for you, switching the music between staves as needed, but that is a way off.