Re: Pages and line breaks

[Jan Nieuwenhuizen]

Joshua Koo writes:

> Any decent scores that I have will start on the first page, and when
> the music ends, the music ends near the bottom at the last page.

Yes.

> But for Lilypond, I find it weird because music sometimes end at the
> last page midway, which means thats about half page blank.

Yes.  That is because it is a hard thing to get right, and lots of
things needed to be changed before I could start on this problem.
FYI, LilyPond has lots of areas of improvement.

> By determining how many pages to use, I guess Lilypond should be
> able to calculate the number of bars for each page, and if to space
> out more(maybe for longer notes), or to use bigger staff sizes.

We thought about this, as I said in my previous mail.  I do not think
we will have this sort of trickery any time soon.  I think it is
better to ask the user to change the scaling, change the margins or
change the note spacing.

I'm afraid that trickery is not easy to implement, that it will
probably just not do what the user wants and will be clumsy to
influence if the outcome is not what you want.

> Good scores have good turns

The problem is to determine what those are.  There's currently only
one good algorithm that I know to work: ask an engraving expert.  You
can help finding an algorithm that can be translated into code by
experimenting, as I suggested in my previous mail.

> there's this Chinise saying like "know thy enemies, know thyself,
> 100 battles fought, 100 battles won"

What are your enimies, and what are you going to do to fight them?

> Was just thinking if Lilypond doesn't have (but I think it does
> have) any methods of determining for page breaks, these can be
> considered.

LilyPond 2.3.4 has page breaking that you can influence by giving
penalties.  If you think more automation is important, you are invited
to play with the penalties and work on an algorithm to implement.
Please give me the feeling that I'm not feeding a troll.

Jan.

-- 
Jan Nieuwenhuizen <address@hidden> | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
http://www.xs4all.nl/~jantien       | http://www.lilypond.org