I ran into problems that started with an empty measure in a drum staff, that also caused the measure from not being shown at all in the drum part. I added a bar for a cadenza (in another instrument). All staves got a whole rest in the measure - except for the drum staff. Tried to tamper a bit with the “start voice/end voice” stuff, no change. Got the advice to try to activate the caret, move it to the measure, do “Shift-B” and type “rest”. Unfortunately no difference. Made some tries with different changes and discovered more strange behaviour. See pix below
No bug here that I can see. Check out the “Ends voice” property.
- If all voices end before an empty bar, so no bar rest shows (what you called “strange measures”*), no fermata will display either
- You can get rid of unwanted double fermatas with the first option in
Engraving Options > Holds and Pauses
*) an amusing term that might be useful for many things
There are unfortunately multiple issues here. If we take them one by one and start from the beginning, you do not consider it a bug that adding a bar in the score gives whole rests in all staves except for the drum staff? That was the first thing happening here and as I wrote, any attempts with start voice/end voice did not help (btw I haven’t changed any such settings at all). Neither did shift-B + “rest”. Is this per design you mean?
Dan, what you need to understand is that percussion written in a 5-line staff in Dorico is a different beast than writing for a pitched instrument. It’s an abstract representation that follows rules, that’s… well, a different level of abstraction than writing for a oboe. Unless you’re writing for two oboes and you’re using condensing.
This is why you need to take options into account. In notation options>Percussion, you can choose different things, among which the behavior with rests. In Layout options>Percussions, this is where you decide whether your percussions show up as single line instruments or if you decide to show them “condensed” on a 5-line staff, with different settings you set in the kit editor.
Mark tells you there’s no bug here, because he knows how he could get the result you want, setting different options differently.
I’d gladly have had a look to your file if you had provided it with your (lengthy) post, but without a file, I admit it’s kind of a hassle to have to guess what your settings are and what they should be in order to obtain the result you need. I think the advice to help us help you is pinned in the forum, and the main rule is to send a dorico file that exhibits the problem, especially when there’s more than one 
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I can supply you with the file that starts at the point where the measure in the drum staff very surprisingly got blank. Can I mail it to you? If so, send me your email address via private message so I can see your e-mail address.
You may upload a file here or, if you don’t want to share it publicly, PM it to one of us by clicking on the name and clicking the blue Message button.
Putting your e-mail address in a post is a bad idea, as scammers can harvest it. You should use the Edit mode (pencil icon) to remove it or at least change it to text: name1 dot surname at server dot com, for example.
PM is a better way to communicate here in the forum: click on a users name in the message and then click the message button in the resulting panel.
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To sum it all up, setting Notation options >Percussion to Pad with rests solves the empty bar problem. Then bar 44, the note had End note property enabled, causing the subsequent problems. Last problem, creating a new upstem slash voice for the whole notes avoids having useless rests, and setting the fermata property to One per staff solved the fermate problem.
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