Re: letter size

[Mats Bengtsson]

> I want to have the textwidth
> as great as possible to still be printable on A4.  What
> width is that?  That parameter is easier to manage.

Well, an A4 paper is 21.0 cm wide and you need some margin.
The default in Lilypond is 1 cm margin at each side, so 
linewidth = 19.0 \cm 
in the \paper{...} section of your .ly file should be on the
safe side.

> My printer will print up to 0.25'' from top or bottom.
> Do printers vary in this regard?  The default vertical
> margin is 0.5 in, whatever that means, because it often
> prints closer than that.  How much vertical
> margin do they really require?  Of course I mean a
> printer that would produce tolerable printed music.

I guess it varies from printer to printer. 0.25'' (6.3 mm)
is probably close to what most printers can handle, 
10 mm is on the safe side for most printers I've encountered.

> > > Can lilypond-book produce good copy on letter
> > > size paper?  Is the manual just in A4 size?  If
> > > that is the case, it would be good to tell
> > > people about psresize somewhere.
> > 
> > If you use lilypond-book together with LaTeX, 
> > you can use the 'geometry' package in LaTeX to 
> > explicitly set a paper width and height that
> > fits reasonably well both for A4 and letter size.
> > I remember that late Werner Icking used such a 
> > setting in his scores produced with MusixTeX.
> 
> I'll have a look at that too, but the addition
> of the extras above and below the textheight
> will make a difference, possibly a very great
> one.

For ordinary scores to be processed with ly2dvi, 
you could simply set the papersize to letter and
linewidth as described above to get a result that
looks reasonable on both A4 and letter.


   /Mats