Re: (2.13.x) bottom-system-spacing

[Joe Neeman]

On Fri, 2010-06-18 at 15:47 +0200, Alexander Kobel wrote:
> On 2010-06-18 14:31, Joe Neeman wrote:
> > On Fri, 2010-06-18 at 13:08 +0200, Alexander Kobel wrote:
> >> From the docs (NR 4.1.2), bottom-system-spacing should specify the
> >> spacing to the top of the bottom margin.  From my experiments however,
> >> it seems that only minimum-distance behaves this way, while padding
> >> relates to the top of the /footer/ instead.
> >
> > padding, in general, controls the amount of whitespace that must be
> > present. [...]As far as I can
> > see, this is consistent with the way that all the spacing variables
> > work.
> 
> That's clear...
> 
> > (even though the other bottom-system-spacing variables
> > refer to the middle line of the bottom staff and the top of the bottom
> > margin)
> 
> ... but this is where I see the inconsistency - why not the top of the 
> footer?

For the same reason that between-system-spacing uses the center of the
staff and not the edge. The height of the footer can vary from page to
page and if we use it then the vertical spacing will not be consistent.

>   But I may be completely wrong, since minimum-distance does not 
> consider the extents of staves (or markups like footer?) at all, AFAICS.
> (Besides, I guess the difference only is visible for obscure hacks, 
> since usually padding will dominate minimum-distance.)

That depends. If you want the position of the bottom system to be
independent of footer height then you can set minimum-distance to
sometime large. If you want the footer height to be important then you
can set padding to something large.

> >> By the way, is it correct and desired that foot-separation does not
> >> exist anymore?
> >
> > I did intend to remove it, yes. Is there some important functionality
> > that can't be obtained without it?
> 
> No, I think it's functionally equivalent.  IIUC, you can increase the 
> bottom-system-spacing 'padding by the amount of desired foot-separation, 
> scaled to staff spaces?
> It's just that foot-separation is a much simpler variable for the common 
> user to set than bottom-system-spacing, and it looks easier for backward 
> compatibility.  Not that there is backward compatibility, though, since 
> vertical spacing changed so much for the good.

Perhaps foot-separation by itself was simpler, but bottom-system-spacing
is consistent with all of the other new variables and we don't need two
different variables for the same thing.


Cheers,
Joe