Re: Fixing the number of systems per page

[Anthony W. Youngman]

In message <address@hidden>, Mats Bengtsson 
<address@hidden> writes
> How about inserting page breaks explicitly where you want them? Then,
> LilyPond (version 2.4 or newer) should automatically space them out.
> You may have to reduce the setting of betweensystempadding, though.

Great. So you suggest he does what he says he's already doing :-)

I've got a similar problem, which is why this question interested me - 
but with me it's "ragged-last-page = false" (or whatever the correct 
syntax is).

If I have 12 systems, and lily puts 10 per page, then it looks damn naff 
typeset at "10 + 2". Set ragged-last-page to false, and it looks damn 
naff with "6 + 6" and a massive intersystem gap.

Then add to this bars (multi-bar rests in particular) that are horribly 
cramped because of the amount of markup they need, and the result just 
doesn't look nice :-( The only way round this I can see is to put all 
the *line* breaks in individually - which is effort lily is supposed to 
make unnecessary!

Bearing in mind lily calculates how many bars, then systems, then pages 
it needs, and *then* (if I've got it right) goes back and calculates how 
best to lay it out, is there any way we can override this calculation?

The way I'd do it is something like a "systems-per-page" directive with 
properties "optimal", "first-page", "min", "max".

The OP here would choose property values of 6,6,6,6, while I'd probably 
choose 10,8,8,10.

Lily would then use this to calculate where line and page breaks 
actually go. In my example, it would say "can't cram 12 lines into 10, 
therefore two pages of 8", whereas for the OP it would either say "six 
is fine" or "five is too small, make it six".

(We might add a "condense" threshold telling lily whether to add or 
subtract a page - in my example we're condensing 20% - 2 extra lines in 
10 - while if I had 22 lines it would only be 10% and might well be 
doable.)

Only then would it actually start working out line and page breaks ...
>   /Mats
Cheers,
Wol

> address@hidden wrote:
> > Hymnal project; see example file, attached.
> >  I'm forcing page breaks so that they only occur at the end of a 
> > hymn. As a result, the number of systems varies between five and six 
> > systems
> > per page.  I would like to always have six systems on each page, and
> > have the horizontal spacing change as necessary to achieve this.
> >  Any way to do this?

--
Anthony W. Youngman - wol at thewolery dot demon dot co dot uk
HEX wondered how much he should tell the Wizards. He felt it would not be a
good idea to burden them with too much input. Hex always thought of his reports
as Lies-to-People.
The Science of Discworld : (c) Terry Pratchett 1999