Re: ugly default output

[Kevin Barry]

On Sat, Feb 28, 2015 at 6:47 PM, Martin Tarenskeen <address@hidden> wrote:

Having entered one line of music it occurred to me that the spacing looks quite sub-optimal. Not to say plain ugly.

Just as a test, I typeset the music myself again. With 2.18.2 LilyPond split it onto two lines (which looks good if a little generously spaced). With the latest development version (i.e. 2.19.16 if/when it arrrives) I got exactly the same result as you. The development version has had some improvements to the layout engine that produce tighter output. In this case it presumably decided that the ugliness of bar 4 in your example was preferable to spacing it out to completely fill two lines.

Despite the ugliness the 2.19 version may be easier to read/play than the 2.18, but it's hard to say. Either way I think, as someone else suggested above, that you have found a marginal case where there are just enough bars that one system is too little and two systems is not enough. If you think it is a serious enough issue you could maybe consider posting it to the bug list where it would receive more serious discussion (especially since the changes that created it are not in the stable version of LilyPond yet).

Attaching the 2.18.2 version in case you're interested.

beethoven-4main.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document