"Hide Empty Staves" hides the left/right hand of the Piano if there's nothing there
Reported version
3.5
Type
Functional
Frequency
Once
Severity
S4 - Minor
Reproducibility
Always
Status
by design
Regression
No
Workaround
No
Project
Note: Even though "Reported version" says 3.5, this happened in 3.6. There's no option for it yet.
1. Take any score you have that has a piano in it and delete some of either the left or right hand. Make sure a whole system of either hand is empty.
2. In Format > Styles, check "Hide empty staves."
3. The empty part of the piano is gone. I don't know if that's how it's supposed to be, but that seems weird to me. I've never seen just one staff of piano, even if there's a stretch of silence in one hand.
Comments
It is by design as there are indeed some (rare) cases in which this is wanted.
You can prevent this by going into the staff properties and change the "Hide when Empty" option from "
Auto" to "Instrument". With that setting, this staff will only be hidden if the entire instrument is empty. You'll want to set this for both staves.FWIW, the cases where the default behavior is desirable are not rare in the jazz world for piano, where it's extremely common to have piano parts that have one staff with chord symbols for portions of the part. Nor are they rare in other genres for other instruments that sometimes use two staves like marimba.