"Show staff anyway" layout element

[tygoee]

Your idea

When writing (especially pre-engraved) orchestral pieces in Musescore, I use "Hide empty staves" to hide all empty staves. This works nicely, but there are sometimes reasons to show them anyway:

• For confusion: if there are two piano parts where one or the other is often not playing, you may want to show both of them to know which one is playing
• For different instrument 'groups': look at this concerto, there are essentially three different groups, how a system is formatted n: all (hobo+horn+piano+strings), piano (just piano) and wind/strings (hobo+horn+strings).
  The wind instruments often have systems where they are not playing, so they don't show up. But in those measures, they have to be visible together with the strings section.
• Same instrument: I've read that's already possible with the 'instruments' option when selecting which measures to hide when empty

Problem to be solved

There's currently no way to do this in musescore. I've seen multiple questions on musescore.org about this topic #331110 #237664 #198946 and the answer is usually either 'that's not possible' or 'try this workaround'.

Prior art

Suggested workarounds I've seen are:

• Add a note and hide it. This works, but you'll have the problem of readding the rest. I'd do that with a second voice
• I saw something about vertical text frames?..
• My current way of doing this, adding 'empty' staff text with just a single space

Besides this making export files sloppy, I also ran into an issue when creating parts: the multimeasure parts were broken apart. I tried to solve it, but after trying to hide/move/remove it individually from the main score i ended up creating seperate instruments/staves.

Additional context

In ons of these issues I recall seeing a Musescore team member/contributer respond that it would be nice if it had this feature, but I couldn't find the issue.

For reference, here is the transcribed file: Concerto_No._7_in_F_Major_K._242_Londron__Wolfgang_Amadeus_Mozart.mscz

Checklist

• [X] This request follows the guidelines for reporting issues
• [X] I have verified that this feature request has not been logged before, by searching the issue tracker for similar requests

[rpatters1]

I just posted this same issue today. It's a popular issue. #25107

[DaddyLudwig]

I generally use white text just saying Text to unhide hidden staves. I do that a lot in operas, cantatas, basically anything where the instrumentation changes from section to section.

[tygoee]

@DaddyLudwig I mentioned that, I do the same. But I'm sometimes also extracting parts and multimeasure rests break on rests