Understanding Music Bottom Margin, Page Margins, Scaling and filling pages
I am using MuseScore 2.0.3 for Windows. I have a four part choral piece that takes up two pages. I want to keep it on two pages, but scale it so the music and text are nice and large.
I have adjusted all of the settings for Vertical Frame Top and Bottom, System distance, Lyrics Top and Bottom and Music Top Margin just the way I want them. The one that has me stumped is Music Bottom Margin. As I said, I would like to scale the music that I have so that it fills up two pages.
With the Odd and Even Page Margins and Music Bottom Margin at their defaults, I can set the Scaling so that all of the systems are on two pages, such that if I increase the Scaling by .001 the music spills onto a third page. When I have done this, there is still two inches of blank space at the bottom of each page. I read up on how Music Bottom Margin and the Odd and Even Page Margins are used to determine the available space for systems. I tried setting Music Bottom Margin and the bottom Page Margin to 0.0, but I couldn't scale the music any larger without it spilling onto the third page. I tried setting the Music Bottom Margin to -100.0 with no luck. Is there another parameter that contributes to how the available space for fitting music onto a page is calculated? This is what the first page looks like: 
Can't I increase the scaling and make use of some of this blank space?
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| How Shall I Fitly Meet Thee-1.png | 249.91 KB |
Comments
It's true that there exist many parameters available for fine tuning a score's display.
So...
The best bet here would be to post your actual score - rather than a picture - so that someone can perform some adjustments and re-attach the score here. Then you can view the (recommended) changes to your original score and compare any different page and/or style settings.
However...
Looking at the picture of your score, increasing the staff distance should use up more blank space. Also, the system distance could be increased so that the entire page looks more like two systems of four staves, rather than one system of eight staves.
See:
https://musescore.org/en/handbook/layout-and-formatting#style-edit-gene…
Regards.
The music bottom margin is the distance between the bottom system of a page and the bottom margin. I don't think it's relevant here. The reason you have so much space is that there isn't enough for an additional system, but you have too low a max system distance set so MuseScore won't spread the systems you do have to fill out the page. But yes, attaching the score is always better than posting a picture.