Spacing issues

[Tom Alsberg]

Hi there...

I was just into beginning to learn using LilyPond - figuring it will
be a nice tool to learn to use, and being fond of music and of nice
typographical output, although not much of a musician myself.

I must say I was deeply impressed with LilyPond's interface and
capabilities.  The input syntax is quite convenient (just took me a
while and a few mistakes to grasp the relative octave pitches), and
the output looks significantly better, by default, than all other
notation software I've had my little experience with.  Keep on with
the good work!

Anyway, for my first exercise in learning after the tutorial, I took
typesetting a small and simple piece of music by Robert A. Schumann:
Opus 68 No 8. Wilder Reiter (The Wild Horseman) from the Album für die
Jugend (The Album for The Young).

Here's my input for it:
        
http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~alsbergt/local/music/sheets/schumann/wilderreiter/wilderreiter.ly
And the output I got:
        
http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~alsbergt/local/music/sheets/schumann/wilderreiter/wilderreiter.pdf

(The other output files including the PostScript and MIDI are in the
 same directory at
 http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~alsbergt/local/music/sheets/schumann/wilderreiter/)

First of all, any comments (on what I might have better done
differently, etc.) are appreciated.  Now to the specifics: 

Without adjusting the spacing-increment, the default output seemed a
bit too condensed, and didn't fill the page anyway, so I set
spacing-increment to 1.6 in the layout.  That made it look rather
well, but it seems the spacing could be improved still a bit in a few
spots:

The spacing around the single note (1/8th staccato e) in the first
partial measure and after the repeat bar in the 8th measure and the
division bar in the 16th measure seems a bit too tight.  Is it
possible to set some minimum distance between the time signature and a
bar-line or between bar-lines?

Also, in a few spots (the 3rd, 7th, 19th and 23rd measures), where the
measure on the bottom (left-hand) staff begins with a chord with a
sharp accidental (<e gis b> in those cases), the sharp accidental
seems a bit too tight with the bar-line before it - some spacing
between it and the bar would look better, in my opinion.  How can I
adjust that?

The space between the last 1/8th rest and the end double bar could
also be somewhat bigger - when I look at some older professionally
engraved sheets I have, the end bar-line is always a bit more distant.

A related thing - a pleasing thing in many traditionally engraved
pieces is that the end double bar-line is not set within the staff
like other bar lines, but right to the edge of the staff - so that the
last staff group always looks a bit longer and sticks (by the
width/thickness of a "|."  bar-line) into the right margin, and the
staff lines do not show through the space between the lines (they
terminate normally).  If I may try to use some ASCII art to
demonstrate, LilyPond gives me this by default:

    ---------|--------------|--------------------|---------------+-++
    ---------|--------------|--------------------|---------------|-||
    ---------|--------------|--------------------|---------------|-||
    ---------|--------------|--------------------|---------------|-||
    ---------|--------------|--------------------|---------------|-||
             |              |                    |               | ||
             |              |                    |               | ||
    ---------|--------------|--------------------|---------------|-||
    ---------|--------------|--------------------|---------------|-||
    ---------|--------------|--------------------|---------------|-||
    ---------|--------------|--------------------|---------------|-||
    ---------|--------------|--------------------|---------------+-++

with the normal right margin
While some traditional engravings have this at the last line:

    ---------|--------------|--------------------|------------------+-++
    ---------|--------------|--------------------|------------------| ||
    ---------|--------------|--------------------|------------------| ||
    ---------|--------------|--------------------|------------------| ||
    ---------|--------------|--------------------|------------------| ||
             |              |                    |                  | ||
             |              |                    |                  | ||
    ---------|--------------|--------------------|------------------| ||
    ---------|--------------|--------------------|------------------| ||
    ---------|--------------|--------------------|------------------| ||
    ---------|--------------|--------------------|------------------| ||
    ---------|--------------|--------------------|------------------+-++

Which (to me) looks better in a way.  Can that be done in LilyPond?

And now a somewhat unrelated question: In the creation of a PDF output
file, LilyPond creates an intermediate PostScript file.  That
PostScript file is sometimes viewable using gv and sometimes it gives
some errors.  But it never prints on any printer I tried it on
(several HP models, Gestetner/Ricoh, Xerox) - always either no pages
at all, or some error message about some fonts.  Is the PostScript
output at all meant to be publishable/printable?  It would be
convenient if for printing the sheets I could just print the
PostScript output to the printer directly, instead of having to go
through the PDF.

Well, that's it for now...  Any answers appreciated.  LilyPond
developers - kudos, and keep up with the good work!

  Cheers,
  -- Tom  

-- 
  Tom Alsberg - certified insane, complete illiterate.
        Homepage: http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~alsbergt/
  * An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it.