Re: stretching and lyrics (was: lilypond-user Digest, Vol 59, Issue 78)

[Arvid Grøtting]

Reinhold Kainhofer <address@hidden> writes:

> Now in 2.11, the lyrics seem to be glued to the SA 
> staff (when using ragged-bottom=##f and ragged-last-bottom=##f), so they are 
> quite far away from the TB, which make the scores absolutely unusable for 
> choir use.

You need to tell Lilypond that the lyrics belong to both staves,
by modifying keep-fixed-while-stretching for either the TB staff or the
lyrics context, depending on how you want the score to look.

> Here it seems like there is more space between the staves of a system than 
> between two systems.

This is where I'm inclined to agree, at least slightly.  IMHO, the
spacing between systems should always be at least as wide, and usually
wider, than the spacing between staves within a system.  (Then again, 

But in general, I'm very happy with the 2.11 vertical alignment
changes, and I do typeset a fair bit of choral music.  Especially when
you have a smaller paper size (or wider margins) relative to the size
of the music than the default, stretching can give a significantly
better-looking score (to this pair of eyes) than just putting all the
spare space between systems.  (As an example, consider a 6"x9" song
book for TTBB or SATB, mostly two staves per system, often several
lyric stanzas, and no ragged bottoms, with a consistent 16pt music
size and a font-size of #1 for the lyrics text to make it more
readable.  Many pages will get three systems, and there will be a fair
bit of vertical space left on at least those pages.  I think those
pages look better with a bit of stretch, but that's my style; yours
may be different.)

In any case, you can always turn off stretching altogether (see the
manual for how to do this) or set max-stretch.

-- 

Arvid