Re: Controlling vertical spacing exactly - mini HOWTO

[Maximilian Albert]

Hi Trevor, hi everyone,

> The following might be of interest to folks using proportional
> notation. If there's any general interest (of if Graham wants it to be
> so) then I'll retype the following as an addition to 11.3.4
> "Controlling spacing of individual systems".

Awesome!! This is exactly what I thought might be of use to many people.
I only recently discovered the "alignment-offsets" property somewhere in
the regression tests and found it to be of great use. For some reason I
missed "Y-extent", though, and am more than happy to learn about it from
your email because it provides precisely the functionality I felt was
missing. I am sure it would be of great value to have it in the docs and
strongly encourage you to retype and include it. One suggestion, though:
I thing using _different_ values of "Y-offset"/"alignment-offsets" for
different staves better emphasizes the effect it has on the output.


Another thing which I think should not go unmentioned because it drove
me nearly mad and which I considered a bug until I found out the correct
behaviour: If you have lyrics with the music then the lyrics lines
behave like staves of their own with respect to alignment-offsets. For
example if you have an upper and a lower staff, each with lyrics beneath
them, then the four numbers in alignment-offsets control the vertical
position of the first staff, the first lyrics line, the second staff and
the second lyrics line, respectively (by the way, is there a
setting/property which controls the distance of lyrics and the
corresponding staff? I found it to require a certain amount of tweaking
to get the "correct" distance from lyrics to staff when manually setting
alignment-offsets; it would be nice to at least know some default
distance). Here is a small code example illustrating the aforementioned
behaviour.


%% Example of alignment-offsets with lyrics
%\version "2.11.10"  % on Debian Linux
\paper{ ragged-right = ##t }

<<
{ \overrideProperty #"Score.NonMusicalPaperColumn"
                    #'line-break-system-details
                    #'((alignment-offsets . (0 -10 -30 -65)))
  c'1
}
\addlyrics { one }

{ e'1 }
\addlyrics { two }
>>


Maybe it would also be a good idea to mention that the numbers are
interpreted as multiples of the distance between adjacent staff lines
and that positive numbers move the staves/lyrics up and negative values
move them down (better to read it in the docs than having to cook up an
example to find out by trial and error).

Thanks again for your contribution! As I said, I strongly engourage you
to include it in the docs.

Cheers
Max