Re: Issue 1691 in lilypond: Ugly bars in PDF documents

[lilypond]

Comment #27 on issue 1691 by percival.music.ca: Ugly bars in PDF documents
http://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=1691

Excellent!  You now pretty much know all I do about the situation:
- for most intents and purposes, lilypond-book has NOTHING to do with the  
documentation or the build system.
- you have a minimal test case for which you can experiment, with both  
texi2html and texi2pdf (without involving the build system!)
- you see that lilypond-book produces a .ly file, and you've noticed the  
difference between the values in that .ly file with various options.   
(there's probably a few more different options you can toss in there to see  
different \paper{} settings, but that's a minor detail compared to noticing  
those differences in the first place!)


IIRC the 3mm comes from an attempt to "reserve" space for bar numbers,  
which would otherwise stick out into the left-hand margin.

I re-iterate that a complete solution will need to involve the "dealing  
with instrument names (and bar numbers)" issue.  At it currently stands,  
lilypond-book deals with a **staff line-width**, but material to the left  
of the staff line takes additional space.  I think we need some programmer  
way of defining a **system width** (including left material like instrument  
name and bar numbers), and then change lilypond-book to set that value  
instead of line-width.

The bad news it that such an addition is completely outside of your and my  
area of expertise.  The good news is that we have a couple of programmers  
now who work on such things, and maybe if you ask them politely to work on  
it, you'll get some interest.  Also, if we end up having a  
Type-maintainability (which seems likely), that could help attract  
attention to such problems.