Experiences with smaller staff sizes?

[Urs Liska]

Hi all,

can you tell me about your experiences with smaller staff sizes?

When I started using LilyPond I was impressed by the default look and 
feel of the scores. Rather often I felt the need to fit more music on 
the page, and for a beginner the most natural (and probably only) way to 
achieve this is to globally reduce the staff size. But when reduced 
staff size to about 17 or even less for some kinds of scores I found the 
overall impression much less impressive than before. While still being 
beautifully balanced and laid out it became somewhat anemic.

For a long time I didn't get around this limitation until I for the 
first time dared to actually tweak the global appearance - which proved 
surprisingly simple: Reduce staff size, increase default font size and 
adjust a number of line thicknesses, paddings etc.
This way I found a setting that looks really nice in my eyes - apart 
from the limitation that there actually _are_ items you cannot adjust. 
When we came to that point in our Fried songs edition Janek actually 
made a few patches to LilyPond to make arpeggio brackets and portato 
dashes thicker than default.
While I think it's extremely cool that it's possible to hack a patch and 
run a project on custom LilyPond builds this is neither a default option 
(which project counts a real LilyPond developer to its staff?) nor 
desirable (go and tell anybody that you need a dev to achieve a coherent 
visual appearance ...).

Anybody else with good or bad experiences when engraving LilyPond scores 
with considerable smaller staff size than default?

Best
Urs