Re: Automatic vertical spacing when *some* values are fixed

[David Wright]

On Tue 13 Feb 2018 at 21:41:01 (+0100), Urs Liska wrote:

> I know that the music can't be properly printed with the given
> combination of paper size, margins and staffsize. But I want
> LilyPond to prefer the solution with two systems per page (in this
> example) because the compressed variant is *really* inacceptable.
> 
> Using further paper variables is of no help either. Of course, if
> I'd want to engrave that certain piece I'd experiment along these
> lines too, but that's not what I'm after.
> I'm working on a LaTeX package that includes scores in text
> documents and matches the layout as good as possible.
> While it is trivial to set the margins to exactly match the LaTeX
> ones I don't really like that solution because the pages will look
> uneven when the top margin does not match the stafflines but the
> top-most element. What I would like to achieve is something like
> this: 
> https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/1812148/35498550-1780de08-04cf-11e8-9553-2bb1aabbe33e.png
> 
> And actually it was possible to achieve it by fixing the margins of
> the staff, but it turns out that this will often result in
> absolutely inacceptable global spacing of the score.
> 
> Does all that finally mean I'll have to experiment with all the
> elements of the paper variables until I find something that promises
> to work generically (i.e. when I don't know the actual music and
> page layout beforehand)?

IIRC you're setting quartets, so two systems of 4 staves on each page.
Can you not just set their vertical positions explicitly as outlined
in §4.4.2 of NR. This might give a very uniform appearance.

\overrideProperty Score.NonMusicalPaperColumn.line-break-system-details 
#'((Y-offset . 0))

Other than that, my only suggestion is a workflow of one system per
page into a PDF → cropping (pdfcrop) → burst pages → \includegraphics
(in LaTeX) which gives you more vertical control of the systems.
But I might have suggested that already, to you or somebody else.

Cheers,
David.