Unfortunately that option doesn’t work for me, because these parts use slash regions, which don’t condense (so I am forced to clear out & hide the 2nd tpt part during slash regions, otherwise I see 2 identical slash region staves). But the behavior in my OP is very inconsistent. In my actual project I see the following:
As you can see, sometimes the multi-bar regions work, sometimes not. And if I add some material in measure 45, it starts working…
Something feels broken here. I really wish I could just use the “Hide Empty Staves” workaround but I am forced to use it as a workaround to a different issue. (and even, why does that option affect this behavior anyway?)
Update after fiddling: Dorico’s fitting algo seems to just treat condensed parts differently than normal parts. If I force the measures into a small space, it will create multi-bar rests. But by default Dorico will fit the layout by using the spacing of the individual empty measures. Non-condensed parts don’t suffer from this because Dorico’s fitting algo seems to prioritize multi-bar rests in that case. Maybe there’s a hidden setting to change that behavior I just haven’t found it yet.
So a kind of workaround is to manually force these regions into a small enough area that Dorico will create multi-bar rests. I still don’t see any workaround for long multi-bar rests (like in the above example a whole line just showing |=== 11 ===| in 1 consolidated measure.
Any alternatives?