On Sat, Mar 17, 2012 at 1:31 PM, Frank Steinmetzger
<address@hidden> wrote:
Example #2, padding.png, shows a piece which has a large variation in staff
height, because there are either two lines of lyrics to a staff or none at
all. As lilypond tries to keep an even system-system-distance, the result is
now that the first two systems on the first page are so tight together that it
is hard to make out which text belongs to which staff.
The second page shows a similar, if not as extreme, effect; systems 2 and 3
are rather heave with all their lyrics, but they appear closer together than
the less heavy systems 1 and 4 to their respective neighbours.
My first thought is now of course to alter system-system-spacing #'padding,
but I have not found a way to make this equal between all systems on one page
(except if I enabled ragged-bottom). What would you recommend?
There are two competing desires here: you want the systems to be spaced more-or-less evenly (ie. with a similar amount of space between the staves), and you want the white space between the systems to be more-or-less uniform. Currently, we give you three parameters to play with in order to achieve the best trade-off: basic-distance (to make the staff-staff distance uniform), minimum-distance and padding (to make the white space more uniform). It seems that you can't find settings for these parameters that gives you consistently good results across different systems. Could you suggest, therefore, an extra parameter (or a modification to the algorithm) that would give you the trade-off you want?
For example, it would be easy to add some logic that would increase basic-distance between systems for every lyric line between them. Would this be useful?
Cheers,
Joe