The BUNCH! When is this going to be fixed?
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When you stop dragging staves around?
Select each red square and Delete, or do Engrave>Staff spacing>Reset Layout
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I didn’t drag staves around, I added a new staff to the score …
It also happens when “Manual Staff Visibility” is used to Hide/Show/Reset.
Also, Engrave>Staff spacing>Reset Layout often does not fix this. The only thing that does work is to drag things around, and the bunch continues.
When is this going to be fixed?
The fact that there’s a red border and red checkboxes at the left side of your system shows that you have moved things manually.
That command should turn the red boxes blue and should fix any manual staff spacing you have done. Make sure you are using the correct command; there are two other “Reset Layout” commands in different Engrave submenus that do different things.
If this is not working for you, then please upload your project file, so that someone can take a look at what is going on.
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Yes, I moved the top system because using Layout Options (Shift+CMD+L)>Vertical Spacing and adjusting “Inter-system gap” (formerly “Ideal gaps” right?) and changing that value does not always work ….
I’ve clicked “Apply” to that particular Flow and even changed the value of the “Inter-system gap” to all Flows, and it doesn’t always works, even if I go to the Menu Bar (In ENGRAVE MODE) and went to “Reset Layout” <<<< THAT does NOT always work … it does sometimes, but not this one.
Because of the nature of my work and teaching, I need to have a lot of music on one page so I’ll make FRAME BREAKS as needed so I can have (let’s say) an entire Rehearsal Section on ONE PAGE since a couple of my groups work on iPads and we do not have the luxury of switching pages and we have great eye sight. So we need to engrave like we need to.
There are many musicians who do not (CAN NOT) follow (or need) a tidy engraving so things can fit on printed paper with room for printing presses, I get it! If PRINTED music is what we’re going for, the Engraving rules Dorico pushes are wonderful, but I need to cram stuff on pages as I see fit to get to musicians QUICKLY without fuss from “normal” engraving philosophies. I know it sounds counterintuitive, but that’s the beauty of being able to do what you can do as you need to.
So, how do we get rid of the bunch when “Inter-system gap” doesn’t work and “Reset Layout” isn’t working? If the answer is, “Sorry, Dorico doesn’t work that way, you gotta use it that way it was intended or else the bunch is what you have to work with” <<<< I’m fine with that, I just need to know if there is another fix in Dorico.
Please and thank you.
Hi @Daniel_Delgado, the Minimal Inter-system gap is just what it says, and what is explained in the text just above it:
“These values determine the minimum gap Dorico will allow between pairs of staves. They are subject to vertical justification, which normally causes the gaps between staves to be increased, unless the frame is full vertically. Specify the smallest gap you would consider acceptable, and rely on vertical justification to produce a balanced layout..”
So the final distance of the staves/systems will be determined by the Vertical Justification thresholds (and your music frame fullness %, which you can read on the lower left of each page, in Engrave mode), that you find if you scroll little below in that dialogue:
A tip: if you set both threshold values to 100%, the vertical justification is “deactivated” and if you also deactivate the Collision Avoidance, your Minimal gap values are not influenced by those settings and will appear as you seem to be expecting. (useful also to experiment and learning how the algorithm works). All those settings work together very elegantly and powerfully.
If all this is not clear to you, it would be much easier for us to explain if you could upload the Dorico Project, and tell us what your desired result would be, so we can give advices based on context, and through the explication, help you understand the logic behind Dorico spacings. Once you understand it, there will be just a couple of clicks needed to have the result you want. 
And here two fundamental videos about layout:
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Thank Christian_R and all! I will look into this (so I can get my head around how Dorico handles this <<<< so many years of Finale, Encore and Notion :-/ ….
I’ll report back … back to work. Happy composing, arranging, notating and engraving everyone!
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