I’m getting a bunch of pages showing as more than 100% full. I know I could create a bunch of frame breaks, but I figure there must be a global way of fising this?
I admit I don’t understand this. It seems like Dorico is breaking its own rules.
The most obvious thing to do is to slightly increase the music spacing, but again, I don’t know why the systems would be above the threshold in the first place.
Yeah, I’m really puzzled. There doesn’t seem to be any setting that should allow this.
So it does seem to be when I enable 'Automatically resolve collisions between adjacent staves and systems.
You’re sure there’s no Frame Breaks already?
As ever, it’s hard to know what’s going on without seeing the file, but values over 100% just mean that the spaces between staves and systems are less than the Ideal values.
No frame breaks. Hadn’t got that far. As I mentioend, disabling ‘Avoid collisions’ somewhat ironically seems to fix it.
I have seen this many times with no manual breaks. Dorico breaks its own rules when it does collision avoidance between staves and doesn’t recalculate how many systems fit on the page.
In my experience the easiest fix is a judicious frame break, after everything else is settled.
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Oh, I looked too quickly. This might be that circular thing Daniel has mentioned. (here’s one place)
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Do you have a casting off option set to XX number of staves per frame? If so, perhaps you have specified too many.
Nothing set in casting off.
What does the rest of the page look like?
Dorico is know to do some rough guessing as a first step to determine how much space each stave might take. If this guessing is wrong (because there are too many text inserts that collide with tempo indications that collide with dynamic instructions that collide with section letters), then this kind of “page too full” can easily occur.
It could also be simply that things do seem to fit fine, and you’re fretting about an internal statistic for nothing. You could decrease some default vertical spacing values and watch the layout not actually change much, if at all, but that box suddenly register 99.8% spacing.
Could you post the whole page?
There’s numerous pages, and any time I create a frame break it seems to just push the issue onto the next page. Here’s one:
Yeah, I just had to deal with something like that myself.
This “first guessing” that I just mentioned tells Dorico that 2 systems will fit onto one page. But they don’t.
What you can do: Decrease the minimum gap between staves so 2 staves can fit there.
Or, in fact, you can increase them so Dorico will know to put only 1 system there.
Yeah this is definitely that circular problem I mentioned above.
My suggestion would be to reduce some of the inter-staff spacing values and padding, since I imagine you’d like two systems per page everywhere.
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So, this one?
What about system gaps? Should I increase those?
Yes, mainly “staff to staff”. But just have a look at your score: “accolade to accolade” will target the gap between the 2 piano staves, and since you have multiple groups of players you might also want to change the other ones, too 
Your setup is indeed the perfect use case for all of these 6 settings 
You can easily try to reduce each of the by 1 or even 2.
Sounds recursive … Dorico no doubt tackles this using recursion, the problem is knowing when to give up and bail out. But seems like it’s basically a packing algorithm, which you keep iterating until you reach a minima on your fit metric, which unless you’re solving this in parallel you may not be confident it’s the global minima.
Don Knuth (famed CS prof) tackled this in creating TeX. Cursory glance is it appears to be a similar problem, that of formatting text with equations, and music, as two different but perhaps similar typesetting problems. I suppose music is a bit more interesting as you have to coordinate across staves.
tl/dr