Re: default margins

[Mark Polesky]

> From: Reinhold Kainhofer:
>
> On Mittwoch, 18. März 2009 12:29:42 Pekka Siponen wrote:
> > The default margins for a4 seem a little too narrow. The normal I see in
> > scores is about 2 cm wide.
> 
> I concur. On most scores I have seen, the margins are larger than LilyPond's 
> (although I have not explicitly measured them).

I have! At one point I was frustrated by this very issue 
and went through my score library with a ruler. Valentin
mentioned "precise" measurements, but to my surprise,
measured values from any one publisher deviated quite a 
lot from score to score, sometimes from page to page.
I even recall a couple of instances where the line-width
at the top of a page was several mm shorter from the
line-width at the bottom of the page. Also, the printed
matter was not always consistently centered on the page.
Thus in most cases, my reported values for top- and
bottom-margin are the same (per publisher), representing a
vertically centered page.

So, perhaps there can be no "precise" measurements; though
I tried to capture the average measurements as best as I
could.

By the way, I can easily confirm the wide margins:

Peters    = 17.75 mm
Wiener UE = 20.75 mm
Henle     = 21.25 mm
Schirmer  = 21.25 mm


One interesting thing to note -- I compared the ratio of
paper-width to paper-height for each publisher, and found
that all had proportions much closer to the (short and fat) 
"letter" ratio than to the (tall and skinny) "a4" ratio.

w/h ratio:

...tall and skinny...
a4        = 0.70707 mm
8.5x12    = 0.70833 mm
9x12      = 0.75     mm
Peters    = 0.75    mm
Henle     = 0.75806 mm
Wiener UE = 0.76     mm
Schirmer  = 0.764    mm
letter    = 0.77273 mm
...short and fat...

___________________________________________________________

Anyway, here are my results:

Peters:
paper-width   = 222    mm
paper-height  = 297    mm
staff-height  =   7    mm
line-width    = 186.5  mm
top-margin    =  10    mm
bottom-margin =  10    mm

Henle:
paper-width   = 235    mm
paper-height  = 310    mm
staff-height  =   7    mm
line-width    = 192.5  mm
top-margin    =  15    mm
bottom-margin =  15    mm

Wiener Urtext Edition:
paper-width   = 230    mm (232 including binding)
paper-height  = 304    mm
staff-height  =   6.25 mm
line-width    = 188.5  mm
top-margin    =  11    mm
bottom-margin =  19    mm

Schirmer:
paper-width   = 230    mm
paper-height  = 301    mm
staff-height  =   7    mm
line-width    = 187.5  mm
top-margin    =  13    mm
bottom-margin =  13    mm

Hope this helps!
- Mark

p.s. should we migrate this to bug- or -devel?