Hi @ulfmanumusik – thanks for sharing the project. I think it’s a slightly different version than in your screenshot, but no matter as the most important stuff is there. (I’ll explain what I can see is different below, as it’s all useful information I think)
Here’s your project back with some changes, which I think is looking closer to what you’re after.
TSE26 Library Music_LH.dorico (416.5 KB)
Things I changed to get to this:
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Staff size: as you can see in Layout Options > Page Setup > Space Size, this is set to 6.0mm overall (space size 1.5mm). When not enough music is fitting horizontally in each system, and also the overall look-and-feel is quite large on the page, reducing the staff size (especially in scores) can help a lot
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Note spacing: as Sascha suggested, reducing this even a little bit to 3.5 spaces tells Dorico that each note needs a little less horizontal space, and therefore that extra bar can fit in the system on its own. (Layout Options > Note Spacing)
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Vertical spacing: the gaps you set in Layout Options > Vertical Spacing > Ideal Gaps are actually more like “minimum gaps” – these set the absolute closest that staves/systems in the corresponding situations to the pictures can go; but if there are high/low notes outside the staff, or dynamics, or slurs, etc, they will always be given space on top of these values. So you can happily reduce these a bit without risking overlaps. You’ll see I’ve reduced all of them by about a space, except for the inter-system gap which I increased by a space. / Then, I increased the minimum inter-staff gap to 1.5 spaces, to give a little extra cushioning between staves with those extra notations etc.
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Vertical justification: this is the automatic spreading out of staves across the height of the page to fill the music frame. (This is what I think was happening in your earlier screenshot, where the 2 systems on each page were overlapping: I think you’d used the Staff Spacing tool in Engrave mode to spread staves out manually, because before your pages were below the threshold for automatic vertical justification. That’s probably the harder way! Instead, either reduce the fullness threshold – i.e. tell Dorico to spread staves out when the page is less full – or do the things above to get a second system on the page, which will take it above the existing fullness threshold. / The thing I changed here was the 2nd vertical justification setting – for when Dorico should only justify systems. There’s a subtlety here, but basically if you want all the staves within the systems to get spread out too, raise this value to something very high (I’ve gone for 95%). You can see a side-by-side comparison of what the difference between these two types of vertical justification are at the bottom of this page: Changing the vertical justification of staves/systems
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PS you can easily remove all staff spacing overrides – see the tip at the bottom of this page: Removing individual changes to staff spacing
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Vertical spacing cont.: To give a bit more space, especially for p1 where there’s less room due to the title, I slightly reduced the music frame margins – this is the extra gap allowed inside the top/bottom of music frames to accommodate high/low notes that extend beyond the top/bottom staves. As marked here: Margins
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Instrument / voice tidy-up: this looks like it was either a MIDI or XML import, so the instruments came through with some additional staves, explicit clefs at the start (which you can identify in Write mode: if you can select the first clef in the flow, it’s an explicit clef), and some creative use of voices. I changed the instruments in Setup mode to make sure they “are” what they say they are (added bonus: there’s a type of Bass Clarinet that automatically shows a bass clef in the score but a treble clef in the part, so I selected that for you); put all the notes into the same voice to avoid excess rests/stem directions ; removed excess clefs and some note overlaps ; and reset beaming for the whole flow.
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Master page: in Engrave mode, I double-clicked the First master page and moved the bottom of the music frame to the bottom page margin on both sides; it now overlaps the copyright token, but it means that the bottom staff on page 1 is aligned with the bottom staves on p2 onwards.