Re: Score spacing.

[Mats Bengtsson]

Ralph Little wrote:
> Hi,
> Thanks for that.
> I have resorted to lilypond-book in the end to squeeze the maximum
> amount of space from the paper, which wasn't as painful as I thought it
> would be!
>
> My main problem seems to be that If I look at professionally produced
> stuff, within a system, the staves are always equidistant. I presume
> that somebody has taken the trouble to make sure everything fits and
> doesn't overlap within this regime when they placed all of the dynamics
> and stuff not in-staff. That way there are no vertical spacing issues.
>
> With that in mind, is there an easy way of "locking" the interstaff
> distance within a system so that all pages are consistent, even given
> that there may be overlaps which I can correct by tweaking?

The point of minimumVerticalExtent is exactly to give this fixed
spacing as long as you don't have any dynamics, prima/secunda volta,
notes with lots of ledger lines or whatever that sticks out too far
from the stave. This parameter defines the lower and upper vertical
coordinates of a rectangle for each stave. However, if any object needs
more space, the size of the rectangle is extended. Then, the rectangles
are put on top of each other to form a full score line. These score
lines are further separated by interscoreline (or spaced out to fill
the full page if you set interscorelinefill).
So, one solution to your problem is to extend minimumVerticalExtent such
that every line of all the staves fit within this vertical distance.
This will give you equidistant lines, but of course it does not solve
your real problem of fitting more music on the same page.


> I know this is a bit naughty, but I'm sure that a consistently spaced
> score page is more pleasing to the eye than one that squeezes and
> stretches to requirement from page to page.

I'm sure you'll find many professionally typeset scores by the best
editors that use different line spacing from page to page and even
within a single page.

   /Mats