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

[David Wright]

On Sun 09 Oct 2016 at 16:43:49 (-0700), Andrew Bernard wrote:
> 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.

or less than a bar if you use   \bar "" \break   which is a
construction much used in hymnbooks to give priority to the lyrics
over the music, especially when each line of music starts with an
anacrusis (pickup).

> 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.

Yes. The first time I used it was to set De Profundis (Mozart) which
is full of  4. 8  and  8. 16  rhythms. This completely cured all the
frequent rhythmic mistakes being made by the choir when previously
they sang from conventional copies.

> 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?

Cheers,
David.