Condensing has moved forward in Dorico 3 - but could anyone help me understand what is currently possible with SATB layout and how condensing can or cannot help? (And yes I am aware of the current issue with T&B combining onto a treble clef rather than bass clef).
Vocal arrangements can often vary in a piece between scoring SATB parts across 2 staves - and then expanding to 4 staves when the music becomes more complex - and perhaps returning to 2 staves for a simpler ending. It saves space and lots of rest bars if a given part is not singing. Similarly it might be that the men in T&B do not sing in verse one and only come in for Verse 2. What is possible at present please? Can a score be configured to vary how the parts are displayed? Can bars of inactivity be hidden? I cannot find anything addressing this - but if I have missed it my apologies - I am new here!! Many thanks Chris
You could probably achieve a lot of your examples using section players and the divisi feature in combination with hiding empty staves.
You can divide players at various places in a piece into as many parts as required, so you could add, for e.g., one soprano and one bass, edit the instrument names to get the staff labels you want, then divide as necessary.
Layout Options gives you a setting for hiding empty staves in every system. You can exclude some players from the list of hiding. If you want to show an empty staff, then at present you need to add something like a Text item with a space to make it non-empty. (Don’t forget to set the Text box to not avoid collisions.) You can copy it to other staves easily enough thereafter with an Alt-click or using the Duplicate to Staff Above/Below commands.
The nice thing about doing it with Divisi is that you can have automatic arrows at the ends of systems where the number of staves changes, and you can easily override what’s shown at the beginning of each stage/system by editing the divisi signpost.