Very curious screenshots. With a partial bar 4, the notes don’t overlap, but with only 3 bars they do?
Do you have by any chance made any manual notespacing adjustments in engrave mode → horizontal spacing?
Anyhow, as I said:
Lillie_Harris and klafkid,
thank you! I must say, this turns out to be more of a nightmare than I ever expected it to be. OMG, what a hustle. I´m sorry to say that, but that´s how it presents itself to me. So, I will try out to reduce the staff size! Thank you for your help, once more!
I tried your suggestion, Lillie_Harris,
the first screenshot shows what step I made with the layout options. The second one shows the changes when I set to size 4, the third shows what happens when I set to size 5 and larger. I´m fine with one system per page, only I want three bars, instead of two or one. Obviously the result is not quite what I hoped for. P.S:: it´s the other way around: #3 is size 4, #2 size 5
I think in this case, before I loose my mind and all hope, I would love you to look into this. Thank you"!
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Please do send me the project then, I think I can see already what needs to be fixed and I promise it will be very simple, it just requires some understanding – which I will share with you 
If you want to send it privately, send me a private message here on the forum – click my profile icon, then the Message button in the pop-up.
Have you actually tried changing the note spacing?
Uhh, yes, I went to layout options, then went to space size, and then tried out different setting. different
@klafkid and @pianoleo , I’m looking at @ulfmanumusik’s project. As they’re a new user, perhaps let’s not swamp this thread with back-and-forth over details in the meantime?
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thanks Leo, my picture is not uplaoding.
If I use a default spacing of 2 3/4 for your project, I will get several bars on a page.
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.
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Thank you so much @Lillie_Harris ! It certainly is a step in the right direction. And I really do appreciate your help. Only, I did not get the results I desire. I´m so sorry to say this! It was a bit complicated to get there, in the first place. I had to first delete all the manual changes I did on the system spread over the page. I did that by going into - Engrave- Staff Spacing - and I reset everything - frame, system and I think even layout. Then something funny happened - one stave did not change, as the others did, and the vertical spacing tool in Engrave mode did not show the small click boxes on the right to change the staves hight (see screenshot). Anyway. After I did that I implemented the data you sent me and - voila - I had a layout similar to yours. Now, this is great! The thing is - I´d like to have only one system per page with three bars each. Would you suggest I go over the procedure you described until I get the desired result, or is there a faster way? And if I do it your way, is there a general hint into which direction I should go? Increase, or decrease values?
Thank you so much @klafkid ! I tried the first and the second workflow again. The first resulted, again, in an overlap of notes. The second puzzles me, because I tried to create a system break at the beginning of system 1 by clicking on the bracket which connects the staves. The small line right behind the bracket would not be clicked. I then pressed shift-f , and shift -s with no frame break or system break resulting. Did I get something wrong?
Select the first note 
(or first rest. Whatever is there on beat 1)
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a bracket has no rhythmic position. You need to select an element at the first rhythmic position (i.e. a rest, a note, a key/timesignature etc.)
Oh, ok. I´ll go for it next. By the way, @klafkid , @Lillie_Harris I now updated to Dorico 4. Out of desperation. Hope that helps any.
And it did, but still not the desired result.
@klafkid I have retried both ways. I either get 4 bars on one page, wich is too much. With the second way I do get three bars, but notes still overlap.
If you’re referring to the middle page in your screenshot, that system hasn’t shrunk up vertically because it’s being justified vertically, because this system is above the threshold for vertical justification (see my previous comment for more information about this). Probably because the bass clarinet has some low notes, a slur, and dynamics alongside notes nudging above the staff plus a slur in the bassoon below – that requires extra vertical space than “normal” for those two staves.
That’s up to you of course, but I would personally suggest this won’t make best use of your page. Making the staff size a bit bigger and allowing more comfortable (i.e. larger) ideal vertical spacing gaps will probably prompt Dorico to recalculate and put one system on each page, and if your vertical justification threshold is low enough, they’ll fill the height of the page automatically.
I think that sort of question is wandering over into more “general engraving” rather than Dorico-specific discussion, so I’ll refrain from much more subjective chat but basically, the options and places I recommended you go to in order to make changes, are the best places (in general) to go to make these changes: what exactly the changes are, that’s up to you, your tastes, and the project’s requirements.
If you strictly always want 3 bars per system, you can also set a fixed casting off – we hadn’t directed you here before because this will force that many bars into a system, even if the combination of staff size, note spacing, and bar contents mean that would end up looking cramped. So it’s good to be aware of these factors so you know what to do when you encounter music looking like that.
I have a suspicion - I imported the material via Music XML (or Midi, I don´t quite remember) from Logic Pro X. Dorico sometimes created two voices within one stave and put stems and rests accordingly - in two voices. I deleted the rests via Write mode, Edit, Remove Rests, and forced the stems to be in the position I needed them to be. Maybe underneath there is still information about the two voices, and when I force a bar to be on an earlier page, maybe those information cause the overlap of the notes, as it happens all the time?