Hi, I do not understand, why Dorico is spacing the staves of the first page of this part too tight (as shown in the screenshot.) Signposts are all turned on (no system- or frame breaks), no page overrides. Staves of other parts are spaced nicely. Any ideas what’s going on here?
The distance is determined by the settings in Layout Options > Vertical Spacing.
The System to system “Ideal Gap” will determine the minimum gap. The Vertical Justification percentages will decide whether the systems get spread across the whole page.
Your simplest solution is to apply a Frame Break on the 6th system. Depending on your Vertical Justification settings, that should balance the two pages, with 5 or 6 systems spread out.
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Thanks benwiggy for your reply. I know that I can apply manual frame breaks and I know about the vertical spacing setting. But I wonder why Dorico doesn’t apply a wider spacing to avoid the collision of items between the last staves and decides to move the last staff of the first page to the next page automatically…
By the way - the part obviously is not finalized yet, as you can see. I would better not give it to a player as it is. 
Sometimes automatic staff spacing is sub-optimal because to make it so would require a recursive routine that would vastly slow down the entire program past the point of usability for most users.
So occasionally one must handle these situations manually, but fortunately that is not often the case if user spacing settings have been set according to the needs of the individual part or score.
Obviously the systems in the lower half of that page are “fatter” than in the upper half, with more stuff sticking out, so visually they want more space than the top ones. Technically, the setting that will accomplish this is not the ideal inter-system gap (which yields this regularly spaced but uneven-looking appearance), but the minimum inter-system gap. You’d have to reduce the ideal gap and perhaps increase the minimum gap until it comes into play. If that allows too many systems on the page, you’d have to resort to a manual frame break anyway.
Since it’s only a couple of pages, I might just fiddle with this system spacing manually. But it’s good to play with the settings to understand what they do.
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I would put “ON CUE - WEITER KRUPA!” on one line of text rather than stack the 2 text items as you have. If you move this text to the right, does the boxed letter M drop down into place?
Just one solution to possibly clear up a problem area.
‘ON CUE’ is system text for all players “Weiter Krupa!” is for the drum player only. I could flip the latter, but it would then probably collide with the bar numbers of the multirest… But anyway - thanks for your ideas!
What irks me a little in this context, is that Dorico reacts usually very well to moving items in WRITE Mode, i.e. shifting score items to different rhythmical positions, but very badly (i.e. not at all) to any edits made in ENGRAVE mode.
While I certainly understand why that is, I still sometimes wish that vertical spacing would take Engraving edits into account…
Especially when WRITE Mode editing is not desirable because of playback and other requirements.
Just my 2c,
Benji
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