Re: default margins

[Graham Percival]

On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 10:03:42PM -0700, Mark Polesky wrote:
> 
> 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 think that's part of how page turns work out much nicer in
printed manuscripts than by default in LilyPond.  I was
complaining to my brother about how difficult it was to work out
page turns in one particular piece of mine, and he pointed out
that I was probably using the same margins for every page.

A priori, I would say that changing margins are **not** a good
idea... but since professional typesetters do it, and I never
noticed myself in 25 years of music-playing, I have to admit that
maybe it's a good idea.


This would require the ability to change margins in lilypond
on-the-fly, of course.  I doubt that's possible in current page
settings... and in any case, it would mix up content and
presentation a fair amount.  Unless we defined something like:
\paper {
  line-width = 180mm
  \page #2 {
    line-width = 150mm
  }
}

I might play with this kind of stuff in a year or two...


In the short term, I like the idea of changing the default margins
(or at very least making an easy \predefined that has a different
set of margins), but I'd rather wait until summer when I have more
time.  Could we add a feature request for this so it doesn't get
lost?
(unless somebody else wants to take initative and organize
everything, from deciding the values, making ly/foo.ly files,
writing docs, etc)

Cheers,
- Graham