Staves and frame boundaries

Hello,

Just a question about how Dorico calculates the “boundaries” of a staff relative to the limits of a frame. For example, here:

The low staff of the piano goes waaay beyond the limit of the frame, almost going outside the page, and definitely out of the printing range. Is this normal behaviour and I have to manualy drag the frame smaller, or should Dorico be aware and adjust staff spacing (I would hope so…)?

In Layout Options under Page Setup there’s a setting for Music Frame Margins. This setting determines how far away from the “boundary” the bottom staff line can be.
You can override this setting on a case-by-case basis in the way you’ve mentioned (manually dragging the frame smaller), or turning on and adjust the Staff Spacing options in Engrave mode, or (also in Engrave mode) turning on Frames mode and flicking the “Bottom padding” (fnar fnar) switch under Music in the bottom panel.

Do bear in mind that what you’ve shown is kind of a fringe case - I mean, unless you’ve got a Bösendorfer it’s off the bottom of the piano!

Dorico does not, and indeed cannot in general, prevent things from drawing outside music frame boundaries (as distinct from text and graphics frames, which are clipped at their edges): after all, the braces and brackets are always drawn outside the left-hand side of the frame. Leo’s advice concerning the padding inside the music frames is dead-on.

Aha, I understand, thanks a lot for the good tips! (And indeed that super low G is off the piano, this is a screenshot of an in-progress composition where I transposed some stuff around, I fixed it since).