staff visibility workflow improvement

Really happy to see the new “Manual Staff Visibility” functionality in 3.5. Now I’m going back to previous Dorico projects and applying this feature, and I have one potential improvement in terms of workflow. Currently, if I want to manually show a staff that would otherwise be hidden for a single system/page, I have to:

  1. Double-click on the relevant system signpost.
  2. Scroll to the instrument, then activate the sliding button next to it.
  3. Click “Show”.
  4. Click OK.
  5. Navigate to the next system’s signpost and double-click it.
  6. Scroll to the instrument, then activate the sliding button next to it.
  7. Click “Reset”.
  8. Click OK.

Because this has the potential to be done dozens/hundreds of times per score, would there be a way of streamlining it by adding a “Show once”/“Hide once” button (or something like that) that automatically resets the setting at the next system (steps 5-8 above)?

Not a huge issue by any means; just a suggestion for future releases in case others would also find it useful.

Andrew,
I for one would certainly find this helpful. Might be complicated to add such an option though…

FWIW Lilypond generalizes this idea: \override, \revert, \set and \unset can all be followed by the keyword \once, everywhere they can be used to change properties of objects. So you can write things like “\set some-property” (which remains active till you cancel it) and then “\unset \once” to cancel it once and restore it.

But don’t ask why there are two pairs of keywords, \override - \reset and \set - \unset. That’s just “technical debt.”

That’s a good point – I think I may have subconsciously channeled Lilypond when imagining this… that’s exactly the concept I had envisioned.

Because of the extra steps I mentioned above, I’m almost tempted to keep using the previous workaround of “adding a text item with a single space on the staff that you want to display temporarily” to trick Dorico into keeping it visible. It’s not nearly as elegant, but it’s currently way quicker and also has the extremely beneficial side-effect of being visible in Write mode (you can clearly see that a staff is being manually displayed). On that note, would visual feedback in Write mode indicating a staff’s manual visibility break the separation of Write vs. Engrave modes? Because it would sure be handy to see when planning out which staves to keep around for continuity across a page spread.