Distance between elements on different staves
This: 
Shouldn't be a thing that happens. There needs to be a boundary or a frame on each staff, determined by the lowest and highest elements - not notes - belonging to each staff. If an element from another staff violates that boundary, the staves should be further apart.
Or at least, that's the solution I'm suggesting.
Comments
There's no collision. If you want more space, use a spacer.
In reply to There's no collision. If you… by Jojo-Schmitz
I think the OP is using the mouse to place the notes and wants them all on the same staff.
It's not a collision, and I put the notes where I wanted them.
Autoplace already moves staves to make room for notes. I'm saying we could do it better.
In reply to It's not a collision, and I… by Laurelin
I agree, it's confusing. Though the user can fix it, there should not be an overlap of the two staves.
In reply to I agree, it's confusing… by mike320
This is by design of the skyline algorithm
It's definitely on purpose, and normally a very good thing that required considerable work to get right. In this particular case you might subjectively want additional space to avoid confusion, but think about if the bassoon note were in measure 1, the clarinet notes in measure 10. Now the extra space would seem a complete waste.
In reply to It's definitely on purpose,… by Marc Sabatella
Only if your score is notation light, like baroque or classical music. Start adding dynamics, expressive text, hairpins, rehearsal marks, articulations and ornaments, and there's a mess. One I've run into before and posted about with the dvorak score. I'm on mobile,so I can't really pull it out.
Seems worthy of a style option to me, though.
In reply to Only if your score is… by Laurelin
Could be. Personally I'd worry more about space being added unnecessarily and thus making some systems not fit on their pages. Maybe the more relevant style option is one to set what the minimum margin actually is between skylines? It defaults to 0.5sp, and the nly way to change it right now is to manually edit the MSCX file and change minVerticalDistance.
In reply to Could be. Personally I'd… by Marc Sabatella
Well, I went and found some of the examples of issues that need to be manually corrected - there's a lot. I don't know if you really need it, but just for surety:
![tooclose.png]()
For this one, check out the trills and sf. One of the trills, the accidental actually collides with an entire other system, it's so close. Side note, you'll notice rehearsal marks are not aligned correctly - they are attached to the first note of a bar, not the barline itself, so they almost always need manual adjustment.
And yes, you can very clearly see the 'too much space' and 'not enough space problem on the bottom. I've tried to change dynamics and text to be 2sp away from the bar, not 4, but it doesn't ever stick. Typically though, those two flute parts would be on the same bar, so the too much space issue wouldn't be so glaring. A2 is entirely too much work as it is currently, though.
Here is a real score:
Here, look at the tuba, timpani, first violin. Very standard score set up, timpani tremolo almost looks like it could belong to tuba. Ottava line could easily be mistaken for belonging to the timpani, until common sense kicked in. Being able to set first violin staff farther away globally would help a bit... but not everything.
More...
Timpani trem and tuba FF are on the same horizontal line. if you look near the top, french horn has a written low A + articulation. Trombone I has a high D + Eb with articulation. They eskimo kiss. This is literally the next page of the score. I'd have to put spacers on every single page. The symphony is... 139 pages long or so. Automation is very, very valuable.
Have a part from that score, Flute 1:
![partclose.png]()
I'm not a hundred percent sure what to do about E, but those hairpins should not be kissing the voltas. They're on different systems! One line down, I think that crescendo is actually closer to the bottom line than the staff it belongs to.
Next two pages, you can see another mess at N - it helps when I pull it over the barline where it ought to be, but doesn't help the FF at the top of the page that is closer to the slur on the system below than one it belongs to. MP and non legato look like they belong to the same system. The FF at H is lower than the high notes a system down and beat later.
It's just all over the place.
In reply to Well, I went and found all… by Laurelin
To me, your examples really look good enough to me already, but rather than add more space to clean it up. I'd consider manually adjusting the trills or dynamics to avoid crowded conditions. Obviously, needed only in the score, and fortunately, these adjustments won't carry into the parts. Not sure what you mean about changes to dynamics never sticking - I am not aware of any issues there. Feel free to start a new thread with a specific example of what you mean.
But if you like more space in general, then increasing minVerticalDistance seems like it would do the job nicely - have you tried it? Definitely should be in Format / Style. Or, since this will obviusly come up a lot, you might consider a smaller staff size and larger staff distance. But again, to me, this looks perfectly acceptable for the most part and is in keeping with what I am used to seeing in scores.