Re: Top margin

[Carl Sorensen]

On 1/18/16 3:30 PM, "Sharon Rosner" <address@hidden> wrote:

>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?

In LilyPond, there is always a way to change it.  If you would prepare a
two-page example that demonstrates the problem, we can have a go at fixing
it.  

You can certainly set the top staff on each page at an absolute position
as described in 
http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.18/Documentation/notation/explicit-staff-and-sys
tem-positioning

But it would be more convenient to do it automatically with LilyPond
parameters.  I believe that one convenient way to do it is by setting the
stretchability of top-system-spacing to zero.
See 
http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.18/Documentation/notation/flexible-vertical-spac
ing-paper-variables

Of course, at that point you will need to make sure you have left enough
space for whatever might be at the top of your staff by setting the
appropriate value of basic-distance.

Similarly, you should be able to fix the location of the bottom staff by
setting the stretchability of last-bottom-spacing to zero.  And a similar
note about the basic-distance of last-bottom-spacing also applies.

Finally, you should make sure that basic-distance and minimum-distance are
equal for both of these spacing values, since that will set the
compressibility to zero as well.

HTH,

Carl