What causes the staff spacing between Cl. and Bsn. here to be so wide?
Just need of manual fix?
The fact is, that your page is overfull, see here:
If the number is over 100% there is no reasoning, Dorico just can’t finish it’s calculations, results will get unpredictable.
Go to the first bar of this page, insert a System Break (nothing will happen) and in the Property Panel slightly reduce the Space size for this page. Until the percentage shows 100%. I suspect, the spacing issue will be gone.
Hm. Is that true? The page is overfull because of the large gap between cl. and bsn.
I’ve never seen an overfilled page cause that behavior before.
Edit: Your suggested solution fixes page overflow, but has no affect on the cl. to bsn. -spacing
Did you move the “a 2” of the bassoons, by any chance? If its original position is above the marcato, that could explain the gap***…
Try to hide it just to see if it changes anything.
***Especially if you’ve entered a large value here:
The default is 1, which I often find too big for orchestral scores.
It is true that when the frame fullness (or system fullness) goes over 100%, there’s no guarantee that the spacing results will be attractive. But generally speaking, what you’ll start seeing is more crowding, not extra space, and in my experience it’s not noticeable if you’re just a couple of points over.
Alternatively, you can hide the player label “a2” in the properties, and fake it with staff text (with collision avoidance disabled). Depending on your condensing settings, you may have to put the staff text on both original staves for it to appear in the condensed staff.