Re: layout tweaks

[Rutger Hofman]

I also feel that more support for control of page breaking
would be very helpful. Up to now, I came away with twiddling
point sizes, inter-system distances, margin sizes etc, but
that feels all very ad-hoc.
It *is* very important to have control over page breaks, e.g.
for orchestral parts. Usually, a page break should coincide
with a rest of sufficient length to turn the page (I know string
players have other options, but I always feel it is a bit weird
if half of the group stops playing to turn the page).
This is much more important than equally filled or equally
spaced pages!

My preference would be the possibility to specify "penalties"
for page breaking at specific bars, like TeX's penalties for line
and page breaking. Extremes would be
  penalty = 0                  => force page break
  penalty = infinite or 10000  => never allow a page break
Maybe Lilypond itself could auto-adjust the penalties for bars of
rests, so the default would often already generate turnable pages.
Of course the whole story only holds for page turns from odd to even
pages!

Another possibility would be to allow specification of looseness
for groups of bars, again just like in TeX. (Looseness controls
density of text on the line). Agreed, this is more indirect than
the penalty approach, where density would be completely under
control of Lilypond.

Rutger

Han-Wen Nienhuys wrote:> In working on a project I'm finding that sometimes a 
system will have a lot
> of music on it.  I know that I can add \break and \noBreak to make
> adjustments.  I often find that using \break produces unexpected/unwanted
> results as well.  Is there a way to adjust the "looseness" overall?  I
> think that PMX can do something like this.  Could such a feature, if it
> isn't already there, be added to Lilypond?
>
>
> check out the section on page layout in the manual.
>
>
> > One feature that Finale has that I have found to be most useful is the
> > ability to force a set of measures onto the same line.  Could Lilypond do
> > this?  Something like \sameSystem{lilypond code} would be easy enough to
> > use.  Maybe it would not be so easy to implement.
>
>
> That could be implemented (it would be slightly hairy). However, it
> seems a very specific tweak. Maybe we can make a more general
> mechanism? Why do you need especially this feature?