Layout // Multidocument

[Trent Johnston]

Good Afternoon All,

 

I just have a couple of  questions regarding layout.

 

I know that Lilypond does it best to layout a score. This is well and fine when a score contains enough staff so one staff group fits on each page e.g. a large orchestral score there's no problem the score is laid out over the number of pages to be filled.

 

The problems occur when the number of staff's allow staff groups to be laid out on the same page. E.g. a piano piece has only 2 staff treble/bass so that the staves wrap to a new line not a new page until that page is "filled".  When mixed with multiple scores each with differing amounts of staves per group (ie. 2 staves to 4 staves back to 3 etc.) then the output produced by lilypond is interesting.

 

I know that the original engraving method was to layout all the staves and barlines before any music was entered. This gave the shape of the score and the best way that a piece could begin at the top of one page and end at the bottom of the last page with everything being spaced out evenly.

 

I assume that the lilypond layout is a mixture of how much music can fit on a line, how many bars there are in total in a piece and then the music is laid out evenly so that each stave line the bars and evenly spread out.. so for example there does not end up being 11 bars for the first line 5 for the second and 2 for the last line the bars would be spread out as evenly as possible over these 3 lines.

 

After playing around with the new layout routines I found then to be very time consuming to match up the line breaks and then start playing a guessing game with the 'tweaks' etc.

 

Would it be possible tell lilypond to spread the total bars and number of lines specified by the user and then evenly spread those lines and staves over the page. I've used PMX / MTX which allows the user to tell the program to spread the music over a number of systems on a number of pages.

 

What I am suggesting is that the user when looking at their layout might suggest that an extra line would better fill out their score. ie. If a score of 2 pages the user notices that there are five lines or music on the first page and 4 on the second they can then ask lilypond to layout out the music over 10 lines / 5 for each page so that the score appears even.

 

Regards,

 

Trent