After engraving the score, I turned to this part and found this. Resetting the layout doesn’t do anything and I don’t know what to try next. I tried manually dragging the staff spacing, but the squares (handles?) disappear after I select them! The frames seem normal for a first page, as far as I can tell…(The aleatoric boxes are not a problem; I just haven’t fixed them yet. I included the whole page for reference.)
Try selecting your aleatoric boxes and turning of the “avoids collisions” property. I highly suspect this is the culprit. Dorico is trying to makes peace for all your boxes and is confused.
You also have a lot of text (3 lines tall) in the last measure; that’s affecting things too.
My own preference is to disable the automatic collision avoidance for text (setting in engrave mode) because things like this that are easy for humans to solve can be difficult for a program. That way, dorico does a beautiful layout by default and then I can tweak as necessary.
That makes so much sense and I had such high hopes, but I’m not finding “avoid collisions” in the property panel when I select the boxes, although it is there, of course, (and unchecked) when the text is selected. It is worth noting that this piece is a revision of a piece I did in Dorico 3 years ago and have edited more than once in various versions and this has never come up with this material before. I did change the boxes to the method recommended in a recent video, but there were no problems in the score, and the divisi is new here…
Both of your screenshots show that Dorico thinks the page is too full—take a look at the percentage indicator in red in the lower left hand corner. This suggests that you may have a frame or system break on the page with the “Wait for next” property toggled on. I see that you have some signposts showing, but make sure that you have frame and system break signposts showing (in the View menu) and then take a look for that property.
I certainly noticed the high percentages…Part of the mystery…I double checked and signposts were on; there just weren’t any yet other than the divisi ones because I hadn’t started editing. (I have to confess that I’ve never used that “wait for next” property and am glad to know to look for it.) At least now, with some strategic frame and system breaks, I am able to manually fix this, but I’ve never encountered that before and would love to know how to prevent it!
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I’m also re-notating the harmonics for how they’ll actually play them, (with diamond notepads) so the harmonics circles will be gone and everything will be much more compact.
If you can upload your project we can try to find the easiest way forward for you.
The page is overfull because your aleatoric boxes are made of fairly tall horizontal lines that are outside the staff: therefore, they require space in vertical stacking.
Start by placing those lines inside the staff, before nudging them in Engrave mode to exactly where you want.
If those 2-line text instructions on each staff are text items, you can set those to avoid collisions in Engrave mode, using the Properties panel.