Force visibility of specific bars of an empty staff?
I often hide empty staffs. Very useful when writing large scores with lots of parts.
But lets say I have a score, choir SATB + instruments, where most of the time all vocals sing together, but occasionally some voice, e.g. the tenors are silent for a few bars, then the tenor staff might be hidden if those bars happen to occupy a whole row.
Is there any way to forcibly "unhide" specific bars? My desired end result is that all SATB staffs should either be visible together, if any of them contains visible elements, or all hidden, if none have visible elements.
This does not need to be an automatic feature, it's enough if there's a way to force a an empty bar to be visible.
Comments
One way to "unhide" a system is as follows:
1. Place a staff text in one bar
2. Make the font colour white
The white text is invisible to the human reader, but the presence of the staff text makes the bar (and the system) "not empty".
In reply to One way to "unhide" a system… by DanielR
Ah! Great idea. But how do I set the font colour? While I know how to do that in Word/Pages/etc, I can't find a control for it in MuseScore.
In reply to Ah! Great idea. But how do I… by lenborje
In reply to Click on the Staff Text to… by DanielR
Wonderful! Thanks!
In reply to Wonderful! Thanks! by lenborje
Depending on the final export you might prefer a transparent (change the alpha/opacity of the color) text over a white one.
In reply to Depending on the final… by jeetee
Thanks; I'll keep it in mind.
In reply to One way to "unhide" a system… by DanielR
I've discovered it is sufficient to enter a space character in the system text!
In reply to I've discovered it is… by lenborje
It does, it just makes it very hard to select/discover this afterwards.
In reply to It does, it just makes it… by jeetee
... and (in passing) I think that I should credit @jeetee for originally making this suggestion, which I have "borrowed" from previous posts. ;-)
In reply to I've discovered it is… by lenborje
The space works for now, but it's also possible at some point MuseScore might discover this "empty" text and remove it for you. So I'd prefer the transparent text personally. Obviously, it would be great if we had a dedicated element you could add from the palette for this, or other controls.