Is there a workaround to prevent invisible rests taking up space
As discussed in https://musescore.org/en/node/301555 invisible rests still occupy space in the score. This can lead to difficulties in achieving a desired notation.
My particular case arose when trying to notate a clarinet + piano piece where the piano had a cadenza and the clarinet also had a note at the start of the measure. I used insert mode for the cadenza bar and had to fill the clarinet part with rests. The piece was in 3/8 and I wanted the measure to look like a standard 3 beats long and so I made the "extra" rests that corresponded with the extended piano part invisible, but as they took up space the clarinet part has a rather odd looking bar with a gap at the end.
Can someone cleverer than me suggest a way to avoid the gap.
If not, perhaps invisible rests should have a "take/do not take space" attribute.
Comments
In theory you could uncheck automatic placement for a note or rest and it would be ignored in spacing, but the reality is even if we tried to implement that, it wouldn't work given the current spacing algorithm, as the segments would still be there so you'd get some nominal amount of space no matter what. And somehow, needing to use invisible rests and turning off autoplace on all other staves seems the wrong way to solve the problem at hand, which is how to represent the non-playing staves during a cadenza. After all, it could be 20 instruments resting while a single violin has a bunch of notes. This much come up pretty often, so hopefully others have good suggestions for how to handle it.
In a ideal world a "local time signature" on the instrument with the cadenza would do the trick, but those are pretty limiting and buggy. Personally, I might try to make this work by adding the cadenza as a graphic.