Colliding Piano staves only in one Flow

I’m working on a 125+ page piano/vocal score with 29 flows (movements). There is only one flow where the piano staves are crashing (see attached image of the first draft). Everywhere else in the file, the vertical spacing for the piano is great.

There are no frame breaks or forced frames anywhere around. I can’t figure out why it’s doing this. Any help is surely appreciated.

Also, there are no manual vertical adjustments to any of the staves.

What are your casting off settings? (Although it should be the same everywhere, does it change anything?

Feel free to PM file if you like.

It’s because you have both chord symbols and rehearsal marks, both of which take up extra vertical real estate, with rehearsal marks being particular offenders. You’ll either need to adjust some of the spacing values for those other items, or simply have fewer staves on those particular pages (easily achieved with a frame break before the final stave). The staves are collapsed because the vertical space value is stressed past 100% and so Dorico doesn’t know how to handle it. Honestly, 6 staves seems a bit much for that page anyway.

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It might be that you’ve set the gap between systems to too large a value, and you could relax that a bit, which may allow Dorico to do a better job.

Ah yes - thanks, all. Now I understand how the rehearsal letters, chords, and text snippets affect the vertical spacing. I deleted some of the text and rehearsal letters (didn’t really need that many) and now it looks good.

My wish is that Dorico handled vertical spacing (it seems most of the problems exist around rehearsal letters) as well as it does horizontal spacing. I still can’t believe that in a large project like this, I essentially make zero horizontal adjustments!?!?!!? If I were doing this project in a different notation program, it would take forever.