left-margin when cropped

[Urs Liska]

Hi all,

is it possible to produce a cropped PDF that *still* has a defined 
left-margin?

The use case is that I want to produce a score system-by-system using 
the code from lilypond-book-preamble.ly, for inclusion in a LaTeX 
document. And I want the first barline (system-start-delimiter) to align 
with the text, similar to how protrusion is handled for characters.

However, the output is cropped to the *printed elements*, which includes 
elements like the system start bracket/brace etc. Unfortunately the 
width of these element depends on the actual score (a brace over three 
staves is wider than over two for example), so it is unknown where the 
*system-start-delimiter* will be.

The attached image shows (in the first score fragment) how that will be 
aligned with the surrounding text.

The second score fragment in the attachment shows how I would like the 
result to be. For that I created a *regular* score with manually tweaked 
paper dimensions and a left-margin of 5mm. If I offset the image in 
LaTeX by 5mm to the left the barline will be exactly where I want it to be.

What I basically need is a way to have an image *cropped* but still have 
a defined left-margin. Is there any possibility to achieve that within 
LilyPond?

One idea I had was adjusting the x-extent of Score.systemStartBrace and 
the other possible brackets. Since the extent of objects is respected by 
the cropping I can indeed change the cropping. But a) this is measured 
in staff spaces, not absolute units (OK, one could probably get over 
that hurdle) and b) it is only *one* part of the equation. For example, 
if there is a (short) instrument name then increasing the x-extent of 
the brace will not do what I want but create additional padding between 
the instrument name and the brace.

Any hints would be appreciated

Urs

align.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document