Re: 4 hands piano pieces book

[David Wright]

On Mon 09 May 2016 at 14:35:17 (-0400), Hwaen Ch'uqi wrote:
> I have been wwriting A LOT of four-hand music, and I agree in
> principle with most of what I have read in this thread. Even so, I
> thought to chime in with my approach.

I bow to your experience...

> In my experience, I have found that there can be no "master file" used
> for determining page breaks, due to the lovely but unpredictable way
> that LilyPond lays out pages. So this must still be done by trial and
> error. I do, however, use the Secondo file in the end as a "master"
> for generating a Table of Contents.

... but that *sounds* a bit hit-or-miss. Can you find fault with the
following?

Set primo and secondo separately. Examine pairs of pages starting at
the beginning. If the page break occurs at the same bar, insert a
\pageBreak at that point in your master variable. Once you meet a
discrepancy, insert the \pageBreak at the earlier position. Rerun
LP. Re-examine from where you left off.

(I don't know where the "master file" concept came in. However, you
certainly want a master *variable*, rather than inserting the page
breaks into the source at two different places.)

> Finally, I also use pdftk to produce the full book, but the process
> outlined earlier can be extremely streamlined if you use the "collate"
> feature. You do not need to burst the files into separate pages; pdftk
> will automatically alternate the pages when combining the two files.

Sorry not to suggest the collate option; I forget it exists because I
never use it, the reason being that I typically don't build files
from mere pairs of L and R pages, but from scanned pages which have
needed masking at the margins. I put different masked/offset copies
into different directories, then move the best version of each page
into the assembly-directory. Everything's quick and easy to that
point, but the final collation has to be done manually. I find
moving pages in Midnight Commander less error-prone even than using
page-ranges in pdftk.

Cheers,
David.