In published full scores, it’s customary to omit from a system any staves consisting entirely of rests, which results in a more compact and readable score. This is sometimes called "French scoring." In Finale, this process of suppressing the printing of empty staves within each system is called optimizing systems. When you optimize a completely empty staff system, Finale will still display the top staff, even though it’s blank.
Optimizing systems in Finale has another important benefit: it permits staves to be independently movable in Page View. Under normal circumstances, you can only move, respace, or rearrange staves in Scroll View, using the Staff Tool. If you have optimized a system, however, you’ll find that the Staff Tool works in Page View, too, letting you vary the positioning and spacing of staves as they’ll appear on the printed page. You can even regroup and rebracket them. If you just want to respace one system, use the To create variable-distance systems command.
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