Top margin

[Sharon Rosner]

Hello

I'm currently exploring layout in lilypond and have come across a problem
which I haven't noticed before and it's kind of a show stopper for me. In
Elaine Gould's excellent "Behind bars" she states:

"Match the levels of top and bottom staves across facing pages, regardless
of whether the pages have the same number of staves.

Ideally pages should have consistent top and bottom stave levels throughout
a piece." (p. 487)

I take this to mean that that the top stave lines should be at the same
distance from the top of the page throughout a piece, or at least on facing
pages. But apparently, this kind of constraint is not really possible with
lilypond. Experimenting a bit with setting top-margin, I noticed that this
setting determines the distance from the top edge of the page to the stave's
"skyline", and this assuming the header markup is turned off.

In many cases this would not be such a problem, as the highest object on the
top staff would be the bar number. But in cases where there are high notes
on ledger lines, or other objects high above the top staff, this would lead
to the distance between the top of the page and the actual top line of the
top staff changing from page to page, which creates a somewhat unpleasant
appearance for facing pages.

So, am I missing something or is this the expected behavior for Lilypond? Is
this something that can be changed in some way?

I also have a related question about headers and footers. I noticed that the
documentation does not discuss at all the relation between headers, footers
and page margins. How do the headers and footers affect page margins? Do
they just gobble up space at the printable edges?

Thanks
Sharon



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