More options to hide empty staves

• Mar 8, 2016 - 12:16

Musescore lets you hide empty staves. However, the only option you have is to apply it to whole score or not hide the system first. There should be an option to control this in each system. I know there are workarounds, but they affect multimeasure rests.


Comments

Could you explain your use case in more etail - perhaps a sample score showing what you want and why? Note for a future release (not 2.0.3) there is already implemented some more options to control hide empty staves on a staff by staff basis - in addition to the existing "never hide" option, there will be additional options to hide particular staves when empty when without setting hide empty staves globally, plus an option to keep related staves together (eg, hide both staves or neither for piano).

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Suppose I have a score for strings and woodwinds. In such music there are a range of bars where only the strings play. In that section (and only there) I want hide the woodwinds. In the rest of the piece I want to show all instruments even when they are not playing.. AFAIK even the options to be implemented affect a particular staff as a whole. It is not possible choosing to hide or not by range. I think there could be a dialog box to system properties, where someone could mark i.e. "Hide empty staves on this system".

In reply to by mtuliosax

Exactly. "System" is an amorphous concept in MuseScore (or indeed msot programs) since any time you change anything about the layout, systems might end up containing different measures. Consider, then, what happens if you increase the staff size, and suddenly system #17 is a totally different set of measures than it was before - maybe not within that string passage at all any more. So figuring out a way to achieve the desired result without having to attach properties to something so impermanent. Specifying by measure might be better, but I'm trying to see what other possibilities might work too.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

That's one possibility, although when I think about what's involved in designing the user interface for something like that - also consider what happens if measures are added or deleted, or if you change your mind and need to change which measures are covered, and you have multiple different ranges involved, it gets a bit hairy.

A more straightforward approach might be a special marker available on the palette that you could place in a range of measures that says "consider this measure empty for the sake of multimeasure rests, but not for hide empty staves". This might display as an icon in the score like a line break so you could easily see which measures are so marked and delete the marks.

Yes, it will be very useful! I was working on some teaching templates using the always changing piano stave on different systems (two staves / one stave), and I must finish all the score to start working on the layout.. Could be great to work with hide/show option for each system separately.

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