Hi,
When typesetting a book with many scores and with possibly some text
sections, page breaking may become an inextricable issue:
1) the default, "optimal", page breaker, which gives the best result
wrt line and page breaking when there is no or little text, cannot be
used when the book is very large (say, for an opera conductor score);
I remember this has been previously discussed on the mailing list, but I can´t find it; can you remind me why the default breaker doesn´t work with text?
Also, I know that there are scaling issues with large books -- do you see them with large score blocks or only when there are many scores?
2) the "minimal" page breaker that was added as a workaround, gives
better results for large portions of text, but is not satisfying when it
comes to score pieces. However it is currently the only option for large
books.
Thus, a solution could be to define several parts in a book, where
different page breakers can be used. For instance:
\paper {
%% default paper settings, for the whole book
#(define page-breaking ly:optimal-breaking)
...
}
\bookpart {
%% page title, preface, table of contents, etc.
\paper {
#(define page-breaking ly:minimal-breaking)
}
...
}
\bookpart {
%% the first act
...
}
etc
This functionality could be obtained by having multiple files, using first-page-number and concatenating the output into a single pdf. I agree that this isn´t a very nice workaround so I don´t have any objections provided that this can be implemented relatively simply. This would also deal with the feature request for per-score ragged-last-bottom.
Joe