I have a lay-out in which for some reason, Dorico makes the distance btween systems very big. If I change that, Dorico still doesn’t automatically change that into more systems per frame. Now I manually made the vertical space between the systems as small as possible, but still, dorico won’t put more systems in one frame. I don’t see any frame breaks whatsoever. How can I force Dorico to allow more systems in a frame, so on my page? There’s plenty of empty space now.
If I change the lower space (37.2) into 6, one higher becomes 37
@RoelVanWijk can you please upload your project. It will make things very quick.
Yes, Dorico will not pull systems over to one page if you have manually adjusted the systems.
Go to Layout Options and under Vertical Spacing reduce the Minimum Gap between systems.
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Op karakter - Pruuf Mar TD.dorico (1.2 MB)
There’s something very strange going on. When I delete all your staff spacing, one of the systems disappears! I’ll keep looking.
You did the odd spacing. Manual spacing is the very last choice if anything else doesn’t work.
My suggestion with global settings:
- In Engrave Mode select menu Engrave > Staff Spacing > Reset Layout (you have to do it for all parts where you modified the spacing manually).
- In Layout Mode > Page Setup select all parts and set the page margins to 10mm top and bottom / 12.7 mm left and right and Music Frame Margins to 10mm/10mm. Apply.
- In Layout Mode > Vertical Spacing set Intersystem Gap to 8 spaces (also with all parts selected).
If this is going to become some sort of marching band page format I recommend also to decrease all margins – including the frames in the page template – to a minimum to get more space for the music.
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Here is an updated version of your project.
All I did was reset the staff spacing and change the Inter-system Gap to 6 Spaces.
Op karakter - Pruuf Mar TD v2.dorico (1.2 MB)
The other thing you can do is set the Casting Off to a certain number of systems per page.
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Now reduce the top and bottom margins of the frame a bit, and 
the last system should fit right onto the page.
(Also the repeat endings are flying high above the stave.)
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You guys are marvellous! First I did everything @Vadian said, and it worked. Then I figured out what I did, and try to remember this. Big thank you to everyone!
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As a general rule in Dorico: First, see where you can get without any manual changes, only by tuning some general options.
Second, apply some distinct special changes regarding note spacing, page templates, flow headers etc.
And only as the last resort, do some manual overrides.
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Another note: The default page template for the parts is designed for DIN A4 (in Europe). When you increase the page size then the text sizes in the frames become disproportional big. A good practice is to create a dedicated page template and adjust the frames / text sizes.
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I try to avoid manual changes, but I still can’t figure out how to convince Dorico that it should recalculate auto spacing. If Dorico automatically leaves room for e.g. a coda-sign, the space doesn’t become smaller after moving the sign, only when I change Space Size in Page Setup. Somehow that makes me doing manual changes.
Why does Dorico recalculate in Write mode, but not in Engrave mode?
The short (but admittedly unsatisfying) answer: Because it’s currently not programmed that way.
I would also love for a process where I manually move something to the side and then say “Dear Dorico, I’ve made more room here to help you, please recalculate your stuff.”
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Dorico does not recalculate spacing in response to manual changes. The dev team has explained that this is to avoid a circular problem: you move one thing to resolve a spacing issue, and Dorico recalculates, which causes another spacing issue, etc.
For some objects, you can turn off the object’s Avoid Collisions property. This removes the object from Dorico’s spacing algorithm, and then it will recalculate around it.
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Wait, I might not want to have Dorico recalculate all the time, but there must be another way than having to change the Space Size and back to trick Dorico into recalculating? If I exclude all those objects then I have a greater problem. Just recalculating on demand would’t be too hard to implement?
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That’s not how Dorico works.
Changing some option and then changing it back will result in exactly the same result.
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