Why is "Hide" and "Disable collision" not a (more) common engraving property?

[tomaeto]

“Hide” and “Disable collision” are two properties I frequently find myself looking for. I assume there are technical reasons why they’re not available everywhere, but they feel so fundamental that I often expect them to just be there. At this point it almost feels like they could live alongside the common properties (Offset, Suppress playback, Scale, Color, etc.).

Here are a few situations where I regularly run into this:

• In condensed scores, I sometimes want to hide duplicate elements to declutter the page (i.e., dynamics shared across multiple instruments).
• Aligning text to a rhythmic grid in a measure. The common workflow is to add a grace note and then set its custom scale to 1%. It works, but has always felt “hacky”, and more importantly it removes any visible trace in the editor (i.e., a signpost indicating that something is there).
• Sometimes the vertical spacing between staves feels uneven due to the auto placement of certain text elements (looking at you, rehearsal marks).
  To that point, dynamics also often reflow entire frames when I move them up and down, making it sometimes impossible for me to position them between two stave lines where I want them to.
• Some workarounds (i.e., replacing text with whitespace) technically hide things, but then they completely disappear. Ideally, hidden elements would still show up as signposts.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that “hiding” behaves quite differently depending on the element. For example:

• noteheads vs. stems can be hidden separately
• dynamics vs. their prefix/suffix behave differently

So I’m wondering if there could be a bit more consistency there. If I can select parts of an element individually, it would feel natural if “Hide” applied consistently at that level too.

Here’s a couple of instances where I missed these settings in the past:

Element	Hide	Avoid collision
Instrument change labels	¹
Rehearsal Marks
Dynamics (intensity marking)
Gradual dynamics
Player labels (when condensing)
Tempo markings
Ties

¹ In Engraving, I am able to hide the prefix and set the custom text to a single whitespace to hide it. As mentioned above, however, the element then is completely hidden in the editor, where I’d like to have a signpost indicating the existence of an element.

[tomaeto]

Some instances from other posts:

• Turn off avoid collisions for Rehearsal marks?
• Hide rehearsal marks on parts
• FR: Avoid Collision toggle / Common Properties (Daniel’s comment kind of outlines the problems with introducing Avoid collision and Hiding to more elements and that, as a design choice, it’s unlikely to be added as a general setting anytime soon )
• Tempo collision avoidance

[PjotrB]

@tomaeto

dynamics shared across multiple instruments

If the dynamics are perfectly equal, condensing should take care of that already. If the dynamics don’t condense, it may be a sign of inconsistency between them. It may be hard to find what’s different. Often, it’s just how dynamics are grouped or not, or a hairpin stretching into the next bar for one part only, that is, stuff you don’t see until you select an item.

@tomaeto

Aligning text to a rhythmic grid in a measure. The common workflow is to add a grace note and then set its custom scale to 1%

I don’t quite understand what you mean here. You use grace notes to place lyrics out-of-rhythm? Could you show an example?

[tomaeto]

@PjotrB

If the dynamics are perfectly equal, condensing should take care of that already. If the dynamics don’t condense, it may be a sign of inconsistency between them. It may be hard to find what’s different. Often, it’s just how dynamics are grouped or not, or a hairpin stretching into the next bar for one part only, that is, stuff you don’t see until you select an item.

Thank you for the hints. I am aware of these intricacies, but wanted to leave out any specifics in this discussion on purpose. I just think that offering a more consistent experience to the user is beneficial, even if they use it in unconventional places.

Though Daniel argues that

[…] hiding an item is not something that can be achieved generically, and in most cases I don’t think this is a good idea, as rehearsed endlessly here on the forum for many years. I don’t think there are many items that it would make sense to be able to hide that are not already catered for.

so I suppose this will never implemented for the general case

@PjotrB

I don’t quite understand what you mean here. You use grace notes to place lyrics out-of-rhythm? Could you show an example?

1. For a tied note into a coda, I used a grace note to imitate the tie.

2. Slurs from grace notes to normal notes with high interval jumps look wonky. One fix is to add a note in the second voice to which to slur to and set its scale to 1%.
   Slurs on string multi-stops - #2 by johnkprice

[SuperG]

@tomaeto

Slurs from grace notes to normal notes with high interval jumps look wonky. One fix is to add a note in the second voice to which to slur to and set its scale to 1%.
Slurs on string multi-stops - #2 by johnkprice

That’s the one. Welcome to the “1 percenters” club.

That’s pretty near the top of my personal trick bag.