unmetered music - page breaks and empty bar lines

[Peter Van Kranenburg]

Dear list,

I'm typesetting unmetered music. My question is: what is the right (or 
best) approach to do so?

If I set Score.timing to false, I have to insert \bar "" everywhere in 
order to let lilypond figure out a nice layout. That's tedious.

My current approach is this:

----
\layout {
  \context {
        \Score
        \remove "Bar_number_engraver"
        \override BarLine #'transparent = ##t
        \override TimeSignature #'transparent = ##t
  }
  \context {
          \PianoStaff
          \override SpanBar #'stencil =
          #(lambda (grob)
                (if (string=? (ly:grob-property grob 'glyph-name) "|")
                        (set! (ly:grob-property grob 'glyph-name) ""))
                (ly:span-bar::print grob))
  }
}
----

At the beginning of the music I do: \set Timing.defaultBarType = ""

So, I set the music with meter - providing lilypond many good points to 
insert line breaks - and I make all barlines empty and hide the meter. 
The problem is that the (empty) bar lines still occupy space, causing 
the notes to be spaced unevenly (see attached example - the bottom part 
is where the bar lines are when they are not empty. The space before the 
final note is really bad).

I tried to set the next-note distance to 0 in the space-alist of 
barline, but that didn't remove all horizontal space.

Is there a better way to do this?

Thanks in advance.

Best,
Peter van Kranenburg

unmetered_example.png
Description: PNG image