Re: How do I keep space between staves reasonable?

[Knute Snortum]

On Fri, Jun 24, 2022 at 7:49 PM Kevin Cole <dc.loco@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'm sorry I don't know how to create a minimal working example.
>
> I have a rather simple melody with a single staff (vocal). Under the
> staff I have two stanzas of lyrics (the first verse and the chorus).
> After the score, I have a \markup section with additional verses.
>
> When I have just the first verse, everything looks fine. When I add
> the chorus, the spaces where I have \break become ridiculously large,
> as LilyPond tries to anticipate my needs, and forces the \markup
> section to a new page and vertically justifies / fills the page.
>
> On the surface, what I want to do seems deceptively simple.
>
> I've experimented with annotate-spacing and system-system-spacing to
> no avail. The truth is I don't really understand what I'm looking at
> with all the various distances. (In the annotated PDF, it looks like I
> want to shrink "extra dist (system-system-spacing)".)
>
> If I tightened the space between the \break's I think everything would
> remain on one page.
>
> Or, if I can't do that, and it has to force the \markup additional
> verses to a new page, it still seems weird to have so much whitespace
> between \break's. I think it would look better with all the whitespace
> at the end of the score...
>

I'd try a couple of things.  system-system-spacing can be confusing.
Sometimes just setting the padding and clearing the other values
helps.

\paper {
  system-system-spacing =
    #'((basic-distance . 0)
       (minimum-distance . 0)
       (padding . 4)
       (stretchability . 60))
}

Also, have you tried playing with the page breaking algorithm?

\paper {
  page-breaking = #ly:minimal-breaking
  % or
  % page-breaking = #ly:one-page-breaking
}

--
Knute Snortum