Re: layout question

[Erik Sandberg]

Citerar Michiel Lange <address@hidden>:

> Hello list,
> 
> I have this piece that starts out with a combined Soprano and Alto and 
> separate Piano system.
> After measure 14 there is a Tenor + Bass system added. After measure 36 
> the Soprano, Alto, Tenor and Bass staves are exploded to 4 systems.
> 
> The numbers are not very important, but it's easier talking...
> 
> At the first page I get 3 lines, page 2 starts with measure 14 and also 
> has 3 lines.
> At page 3 measure 26 starts, but only has 2 lines, and looks pretty 
> weird in it's layout. The first line is completely at the top, the 
> second at the bottom, giving the page a very empty look in the middle.
> 
> On page 4 measure 36 starts and those are the last two lines. They do 
> fill up the page neatly.
> 
> An overall look of the music:
> - page 1 looks widely spaced, but not ugly
> - page 2 looks decently filled, neat and good.
> - page 3 looks empty
> - page 4 looks good again, except for a minor oddity in the lyrics which 
> I should look at some time...
> 
> I could live with some clear space between the lines, but I would think 
> that such a thing should be more consequent among the pages.
> 
> It is engraved with Lilypond 2.4.5
> I have the piece available for display at:
> http://minas-2.demon.nl/~michiel/muziek/blessyou.ly
> http://minas-2.demon.nl/~michiel/muziek/blessyou.pdf
> 
> If you have some suggestions on how to make the piece really 
> good-looking I would be very glad!

The line breaking mechanism in Lilypond is greedy, in the sense that it tries to
typeset the piece in as few systems as possible. In your example this is not
what you want, so you'll have to override it using manual line breaks.

I can imagine that what you would want, is to add another system on page 3. This
could be done e.g. by doing manual breaks such that some staffs with 5 bars are
reduced to 4 bars.

I also notice the empty tenor/bass bar in bar 9, this could be fixed by using R
instead of skip in the beginning of tenor/bass.

Erik