Re: (2.13.x) Alignment of topmost and bottommost staff of page

[Alexander Kobel]

On 2010-06-16 13:16, Kieren MacMillan wrote:
> Hi Alexander,
>
> > is it possible to tell LilyPond to use the same vertical positions for all topmost and 
> > bottommost staff lines of different pages?  Rephrased, can I say "I know what I'm 
> > doing, ignore all vertical extents below the last staff lines of a page for vertical 
> > stretching, even if it collides with the footer"?
>
> Did you try setting #'bottom-system-spacing #'padding to 0 and using 
> #'minimum-distance only?
> According to [my reading of] the docs, this should work.

Hi, Kieren,

it's the right track, thanks a lot.

\paper { bottom-system-spacing = #'((minimum-distance . 2) (padding . 
-10)) }

is the candidate. Looks like I have to set #'padding to a negative value 
to tell LilyPond to ignore vertical extents up to this value below the 
last staff line; -inf.0 is, while technicially the best guess, not quite 
useful, since any footer will print into the staff lines then (and this 
can't be helped with \vspace, e.g.).  A finite negative value is okay; 
the collision with the footer can then be dealt with using \vspace and 
an appropriate (read: trial-and-error) offset.

It's a pity, though, that bottom-system-spacing relates to the top of 
the bottom margin instead of the top of the footer + foot-separation... 
 That'd both allow -inf.0 for padding, and make finding the correct 
\vspace value in the footer far easier.  (For some reason, the latter is 
not quite what I'd expect, e.g. for padding = -100 I need \vspace #31.5 
to get a nice result for a two-line footer?!)


Cheers,
Alexander