Re: Horizontal spacing - How to prevent compressing while allowing stretching?

[Andrew Bernard]

Hi Karol,

By ‘natural’ are you referring to the spacing displayed when ragged-right is set to true, or something else?

As far as I know there is no parameter to enable what you want - stretch but don’t compress. One of the major advantages and features of lilypond is it’s very smart and subtle spacing algorithms, containing a lot of deep heuristics other programs lack.

For me, although it may be tedious and is manual rather than automatic, I simply put a \break at the point you want a break, and this allows you to adjust spacing, up to the granularity of a bar.

You may also consider turning on proportional spacing. For my new complexity school scores I have to say that it just does not work very well at all (the radily changing rhythmic structures confuse it), but for more common era period music I think people have success with it.

There are also ‘new spacing section’ commands you may want to look up. I’m no expert on that - others here will know more!

There’s also some code around to set a fixed number of bars per line, if this is of any use for your scores. It goes against the grain a bit but it can be made to work and there are uses for that.

Andrew

On 9 October 2016 at 9:35:56 pm, Karol Majewski wrote:

When ragged-right is set to false (default) LilyPond either stretches a line (system) or compresses it. I'd like to modify this behaviour so that LilyPond only stretches a line, but never compresses it. I don't want my spacing to be tighter than the natural one.

Is this adjustable?