I’ve got a piece for 4 instruments and fixed media where I am hiding rests at the beginning and end, but I need to show them in the middle. Is there a way to show rests for a portion of a movement? I haven’t found an answer in the Help or in this forum. In case you’re wondering, the beginning and end use unmetered, timed (mins:secs) notation.
Do you mean that you have this option unticked in Layout Options, and you still want some bar rests to show up?
I’m afraid this requires a workaround. You’ll find some ideas in this thread:
Otherwise, you could also proceed the other way around: tick the option, and make the bar rests transparent where you want them to be hidden.
Very interesting! I’ll see if I can get one of these procedures to work.
I wish Dorico would allow you turn off rests in a section of a layout. That could come in handy in some contemporary music (like mine).
Sorry that this is a bit off topic but, I saw that you tried to italicize the word ‘portion’ and it didn’t work because, markdown isn’t supported in the title of a topic.
You can select an individual rest then run this script. (It also works with one or several measures at once). The only issue is that I wrote it a long time ago and don’t remember exactly what it does, so I can’t tell you how to undo it if you change your mind. 
Although if you change your mind immediately, you can hit undo and it all goes back to where you left it. Hope this helps!
Remove Rests.lua (93 Bytes)
One can also run the routine on a copy of the file.
All it does is invoke the Remove Rests command (which you can do from the menu or from the jump bar, or assign a key command to) and then call AutoSave.
The problem with using Remove Rests with bar rests is that the bar winds up with nothing in it to provide space and will collapse horizontally.
Before:
After:
Thanks for your comment, Abraham, but I underscored “portion” because my mind reverted back to '90s email when you had to do stuff like this in the absence of formatting. Don’t be surprised if my next post is via telegram. 
And one of the design principles of Markdown is that it should be readable as plain text, with the formatting marks providing appropriate emphasis.
I was (apparently) able to get around this by entering a note in each of those empty bars and then hiding each note in the Properties panel. After running the script, the empty bars were properly spaced (not collapsed). But I’m not experienced enough in Dorico to know if that will create some unforeseen difficulty down the road.
Right, that’s one of the solutions proposed in the topic that @charles_piano linked to. Probably no downstream effects, except that as he notes you’ll also want to suppress playback on those notes if playback is important to you.
I see. Since the OP had said they were using time stamps rather than musical notation to indicate time, it seemed like a reasonable way to get all those pesky rests out of the way.
At least I now know how that script came into being, which has the benefit of allowing me to create a version that shows the rests I’ve lost when being careless about using it!
Hi @Feufollet,
You can set the Opacity(Alpha) of selected rests to 0% (as suggested by @charles_piano :
You use the properties panel for this (possibly set in Globally scope, if you want invisible rests in all layouts where that player appears, assuming that they don’t have multi-bar rest consolidation):
(Visual guide)
With this method you overcome the no-spacing effect that you would have using Remove rests, mentioned by @asherber .
Just adding to @Christian_R’ post above that on Windows, the color editor is a bit different:
There’s no slider, you have to manually enter the value 0 in the Alpha Channel field.
An elegant solution!
This looks like it might be the most promising (and easiest) solution to hiding unwanted rests. I’ll have to experiment to see if I run into problems (like collapsing bars and no multi-measure rests) with other layouts.
You shouldn’t have either of those issues – as far as Dorico is concerned, the measures have ordinary bar rests in them and will behave accordingly. The fact that they’ve been turned transparent for display doesn’t factor into spacing and layout considerations.
Making bar rests transparent in the score won’t break the multi-bar rests in the parts — that’s also why I suggested this method in addition to the ones described in this thread, which both would break the multi-bar rests in the parts.
But without knowing exactly what you want to achieve, it’s hard to tell you what’s the best solution in your case!
Note also that Color is a local property, which means that by setting local properties to Locally when you change the color, you can e.g. make the rest transparent in the score and not in the part.
Ok, I’ve successfully hidden rests in the introduction of the piece (up to the double bar) using the Properties Panel>Color>Opacity = 0 technique. I have one final problem to solve. For reasons I don’t understand, rests are hidden for four bars in three instruments starting at Q=88 (rests do appear after these four bars):
If I enter a note in each of those instruments starting at Q=88, the notes and the rests appear:
If I delete the notes, rests in those four bars disappear. Why is this happening?
Can you please upload the Dorico file?