I have sections of my project where the piano part has music only in the lower staff, and I want the empty upper staff to be hidden from a full score layout. But it seems that having a pedal line on the lower staff prevents the empty upper staff from being hidden, even though I’m sure there are no notations in it as I select everything there and press delete. Otherwise the hiding of empty staves works as expected. Is there any way to solve this and keep my pedal lines?
Have you tried attaching the pedal lines to the top stave? You should find that they still appear in the correct position.
I just tried that, and yes the pedal line still appears below both staves, but it still prevents the empty upper staff from hiding
Right-click and do Staff > Remove Staff to hide the top staff.
Or write the single-staff music on the top staff, and the bottom one will be hidden automatically. But you might end up with an unwanted clef change somewhere if you do that.
Sorry, my first reply was unhelpful - I misread and assumed your notes were on the top stave, not the bottom one!
No problem pianoleo, that makes more sense now, and thanks! And Rob Tuley, that worked, thanks! I put the music in the top staff and made sure the pedal line was attached to that staff. Perhaps I had originally had the music in the top staff and did alt-M to move it to the lower staff cross-staff wise and then ending up not needing any cross-staff beams. Does cross-staff in Dorico treat it as an entry in the original staff or the staff it visually appears? If hte former that might explain why it wasn’t being treated as an “empty” staff.
There are two commands in Dorico.
M an N make cross-staff notes, which still “belong” to the original staff.
Alt-M and Alt-N move the notes to another staff (like a smart copy-and-paste which doesn’t delete anything on the destination staff), and will even move the notes to a staff belonging to a different player, so they aren’t “cross staff” after you move them.
Aha, thank you for the clarification!