How to hide symbols that cannot be hidden by normal operations: e.g. cautionary clef at the end of staff

When using music notation software, there may be times when you want to hide certain symbols.

For example, cautionary symbols such as clefs, key signatures, and time signatures at the end of a staff are one of them. These are not absolutely necessary, as new symbols are usually shown at the beginning of the next staff. In scores with a large number of notes and rests, hiding these can save some horizontal spacing.

In Finale, these are basically set in the Document Options. For clefs, uncheck “Display Courtesy Clef at End of Staff System” will make it happen.

In Sibelius, you can select the cautionary clef at the end of a staff, right-click, and switch its display/hide from the menu that appears.

The display/hide of cautionary clefs in Finale is a global setting in the Document Options dialog, so it required some ingenuity to hide them individually, but in Sibelius, individual settings are easy to set by changing the properties of the selected symbol.

In Dorico, you can find the settings for display/hide cautionary key signatures and time signatures at the end of a staff in the Notation Options, 

However, we don’t have that option for cautionary clefs for some reason. So what should you do?

Steinberg's official Dorico forum introduces an interesting workaround to this problem. That is, to display the cautionary clef at the end of a staff very small, and overlap it with other objects so that it becomes virtually invisible.

The setup is easy. First, select the target clef and apply “1” to the Custom scale in the lower zone properties.

Dorico's Custom scale cannot be set to a size smaller than “1” by design, so it will remain small on the score. For example, in the case of a cautionary clef at the end of a bass clef staff, most of it will overlap the staff line successfully and become invisible, but the bottom part of the clef symbol will extend slightly beyond the staff line.

For example, if you have a whole note in the same measure, select the symbol in question, switch to Engrave mode, and in the Lower Zone Properties set an offset of about -3 7/8 along the X-axis; you can completely hide the cautionary clef at the end of the staff within the whole note.

At first glance, this may seem like a crude and inelegant method, but since Dorico's product specifications give you more options than Finale for individually resizing objects by using Custom scale, this method has the advantage of being applicable in a variety of situations.

In fact, in the Japanese localized Finale, which uses the Kousaku music font for the default document, the exact same method was used to hide the number “2” in a Two-Bar Repeat Staff Style, which cannot be hidden using Finale’s original function.

[Added 4/10/2025]

After publishing this article, I was advised that you can also hide the symbol by changing its color to transparent. This is certainly easier than changing the position of the symbol, and it is also easier to find if you want to show it again, so I think it is better. (Thanks to the person who pointed this out!)

If you just want to hide it, all you need to do is to make it transparent by setting the opacity to 0% in the color dialog, but in that case the transparent symbol will continue to occupy the space. If you want to save horizontal spacing, you should use a custom scale setting as well, that sets the symbol size to “1”.

If you want to show it again, just select the area where the caution clef at the end of the line should be; the hidden symbol will be highlighted again, and you can then change it back.

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With multi-function professional products, it is often the case that multiple methods can be used to achieve the same effect, but in such cases it is best to use the simplest one.

This is because there is less risk of programmatical trouble and it is easier to remember what settings you applied after many years have passed.

In this point of view, I think this method of “making it very small and overlapping other objects so that it cannot be seen” is excellent.