I’m wondering how people deal with this. I’ve placed ‘empty’ text items in my score to keep staves from hiding but this affects the parts randomly. If I put the text at the beginning of the bar, Dorico breaks the MB rest (where I might not necessarily want a break at all) but if the text is on any other beat, I get an empty bar in the midst of the MB rests, which is completely undesirable. I understand why Dorico works this way, but how is one supposed to create parts the way one wants if one is forced to unhide staves in the score using the text item workaround?
Unfortunately I don’t think there’s a good solution for this at the moment. Much as it pains me to say it, you’ll have to maintain another copy of the project with those text items deleted for the parts.
We know that greater control over hiding empty staves is required and it’s something we are going to try to prioritise for the next major release following the upcoming one.
That’s what I thought. Thanks, Daniel. I have confidence in the team’s ability to come up with a characteristically well thought-out and executed solution for this!
I’m curious how future versions will deal with the workarounds we’ve been using pending upcoming features.
It’s usually impractical to automatically convert workarounds to use whatever proper, native solution is later implemented, I’m afraid, so realistically I expect you’ll have to do some work to remove these workarounds yourself. We’ll hopefully at least be able to come up with a simple way to remove empty text items en masse.
Great!
That sounds very reasonable, Daniel. Fortunately, in this particular case the only text items I added were those intended to unhide staves. For all others I created playing techniques so I can erase the purely text items all in one go, thanks to Dorico’s filter.
I can say, though, that one thing which would have made life a lot easier was if I had been able to prevent hiding particular staves on a per flow basis instead of having a single setting for the entire document.