Auto-Placement takes up too much space on

The best way to "combat" this is to not fight it, but to learn how to manage it. The auto placement is probably avoiding something that you can easily fix. Without a score the only advice I can give is read the manual, but it would be better if you attached your score and let a few people give you pointers. Also, if you have a PDF you are copying attach that or explain where the space is too big.

I'd put it like this: if MuseScore is seeing the need to add space, then the alternative is that it would be creating collisions. Which you presumably don't want. So the solution is simply to move things manually to avoid the collisions. if you see extra space between added so a dynamic marking below one staff doesn't collide with a note above the next staff, then simply move the dynamic left or right to avoid the collision, just as you would have in 2.3.2. The extra space will go away automatically once it isn't needed.

Beyond that, indeed, if you attach your score, we can understand and assist better.

I frequently transcribe pieces with double choirs and orchestra, and run into this problem a lot! When working on scores like these, it is a battle to maximize font sizes to retain maximum legibility (and reduce eyestrain) and still fit all the staves on the page. Therefore, it is extremely frustrating when autoplacement introduces wide gaps for no discernible reason, and I'm struggling with it right now (yet again).

Yes, you can go into your format settings and reduce the spacing, but that doesn't always work. I've found that in many cases, if I remove autoplacement from slurs, ties, dynamics, certain note stems, etc., it will help, but sometimes there is no obvious culprit for what is causing all the empty space.

For example see page 28 of the attached score. You can see I have a double choir at that point, and the staves are being pushed below the bottom margin of the page. There is plenty of blank space above each of the lyric lines, but no matter what I do, I can't find a way to reduce it by any method other than manual placement of each syllable, which is a real pain. Yet when you look on other pages, the lyrics are aligning where I want them to, with exactly the same settings.

Any suggestions the Musescore folks could provide to help me with this would be most welcome!

Thanks,
Rebecca Rufin