How to stop Lily spreading systems over 2 pages?

[Richard Sabey]

I am having trouble getting Lilypond to lay some music out on my desired number of pages, and so I'm posting this in search of suggestions.

The piece is a song. I want it on 3 pages (left, right, left). There is a forced \pageBreak. When this song is coded on its own, Lilypond successfully lays it out, 2 pages before the \pageBreak, one page after. There are 12 systems, 4 on each page.

This song is the first in a song cycle, and I am now trying to get Lilypond to lay the whole song cycle out, with one \bookpart for the title page and one \bookpart for each song. For this song, Lilypond correctly makes 12 systems, but now for some reason it insists on spreading the last 4 systems onto 2 pages: 3 on the 3rd page and the last system at the top of the 4th page.

Any suggestions as to how to restore the previous behaviour?

I've tried putting the following 3 expressions

page-count = 3
between-system-padding    = 0
ragged-last-bottom    = ##f

successively in two places, but to no avail. The two places I tried were:
* in the \layout block in the \score block in the song's \bookpart block.
* in a \paper block in the song's \bookpart block.

The fact that the last system appears at the top, not the bottom, of a page suggests that I have put the statement
ragged-last-bottom    = ##f
in the wrong place. What is the right place to put them? Sorry if I'm asking a question that's answered in the documentation, but I find the documentation is poor at indicating what block a particular statement or block should go in.

Shrinking everything is not an option here: I had already had to shrink the music from staff size 20 to staff size 16 to avoid Lilypond laying it out on 5 pages.

I am using Lilypond version 2.12.2 on Windows XP.

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