Re: Leadsheet - trying to fill page without leaving empty space

[Michael Hendry]

> On 10 Jun 2019, at 17:50, Aaron Hill <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> On 2019-06-10 9:12 am, Michael Hendry wrote:
>> I can usually get a reasonable result by tweaking global-staff-size,
>> but here’s an example of the bottom of a page with
>> [ . . . ]
>> Am I tweaking the wrong parameter?
>> Is there a more elegant way of ensuring that a leadsheet fits in one page?
> 
> %%%%
> \paper { page-count = #1 }
> %%%%

That didn’t work in the particular file I was working on - a second page was 
started.

> 
> Whether LilyPond will be happy about that is another thing entirely.
> 
> Setting and/or adjusting the global staff size is unlikely to be the correct 
> thing since that scales everything.  What you probably want is tighter 
> spacing rather than physically smaller elements.  This falls to using the 
> flexible vertical spacing features of LilyPond:
> 
> %%%%
> \paper {
>  system-system-spacing = #'(
>    (basic-distance . 15)
>    (minimum-distance . 10)
>    (padding . 1)
>    (stretchability . 2))
> 
>  ragged-bottom = ##f
>  last-bottom-spacing = #'(
>    (basic-distance . 0)
>    (minimum-distance . 0)
>    (padding . 0)
>    (stretchability . 1))
> }
> %%%%

These did the trick, exactly as you wrote them, thanks.

I added the ragged-last-bottom suggested by Simon, and that improved the look 
further.

I’ll obviously have to experiment with all of these to get the best result.

Thank you!

Michael

> 
> (NOTE: The values above are just examples, nothing magical nor implying best 
> practice.)
> 
> One could probably write a dissertation on LilyPond's vertical spacing 
> algorithm and the resulting head-scratching.  Here is a quick breakdown:
> 
> basic-distance is what LilyPond will try to honor absent of other 
> constraints.  Specifying a smaller value for minimum-distance will give 
> LilyPond permission to compress the spacing.  padding lets you specify that 
> the "ink" between two systems must be separated by a suitable amount.  
> Finally, stretchability is a unitless number that controls where LilyPond is 
> permitted to *add* space such as when ragged-bottom is false.
> 
> It should be noted that annotate-spacing is a useful tool to determine where 
> space is allocated.  The whitespace you see between the last system and the 
> footer might not be useable space, as far as LilyPond is concerned.  If it 
> has been instructed to keep a minimum amount of space, that is probably why 
> it opted to overflow to a second page.
> 
> 
> -- Aaron Hill
> 
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