Re: Pages and line breaks

[Joshua Koo]

Hi,

Any decent scores that I have will start on the first page, and when the music 
ends, the music ends near the bottom at the last page.
But for Lilypond, I find it weird because music sometimes end at the last page 
midway, which means thats about half page blank. Maybe there's nothing wrong 
with this, but somehow I feeling its strange as I havnt come across any scores 
published this way, they always end nicely printed. (though i see lots of 
software with this problem too) Placing the page breaks where you want them may 
help, but I havnt try them. The thing is that sometimes, the score is 2 pages 
nicely printed, Lilypond maybe prints up 1 and 1/2 pages. By determining how 
many pages to use, I guess Lilypond should be able to calculate the number of 
bars for each page, and if to space out more(maybe for longer notes), or to use 
bigger staff sizes.

About the features of finale and lilypond, I am just trying to let you all know 
of these features just in case they might be usefully for Lilypond. I am not 
here to critise or promote anything. And I not sure how these "features" when 
used how will they affect the page fitting, but I hope its can be for the 
better. Good scores have good turns . But there's this Chinise saying like 
"know thy enemies, know thyself, 100 battles fought, 100 battles won" (Sunzi 
Art of War). Was just thinking if Lilypond doesn't have (but I think it does 
have) any methods of determining for page breaks, these can be considered. For 
now maybe is possible to tell where to break the pages, but I believe some 
users like me would expect the automatic page breaks (just like the automatic 
beaming) to be working.

Thanks,
Joshua

======= At 2004-06-19, 02:29:16 you wrote: =======

>Joshua Koo writes:
>
>> One thing I realised is thats the score doesnt end at the end of the pages.
>
>Page layout has been in development since March.  Check-out the
>development branch, there are packages for several platforms.  It's
>not been heavily used, so expect to find bugs.
>
>> It would be great if I do something like this \fit-pages 4
>
>I have thought about this, but I'm not sure that it is very useful.
>Either the score fits, or it doesn't, given the spacing you prefer.
>
>> Anyway about page breaking, I been to both Finale's and Seblius
>> webpages. Both of them have some features to determine the page
>> breaks automatically.
>> Finale smart page turns options to calculate where page breaks.
>
>Colour me unimpressed.  Having seen the quality and correctness of the
>output they produce (esp. finale) I would be very surprised if they
>got this right.
>
>> Sibelius shows off that they put the multimeasure rest at the end of
>> page so flipping is easiler.
>
>Interesting.  I wonder what happens when you stress that feature.
>This is another thing that we have been thinking about.  With the
>current page breaking algorithm, you should be able to do that by
>hand, adding positive or negative stimulations for page breaks.
>
>Before we choose to automate such a feature, we would like to have
>some good feel for when and where to put how big penalties.  If you
>are interested, you can help shed some light on this.
>
>Jan.
>
>-- 
>Jan Nieuwenhuizen <address@hidden> | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
>http://www.xs4all.nl/~jantien       | http://www.lilypond.org
>
>
>.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =