Re: Issue 1486 in lilypond: Lyrics above the first staff in a system are spaced too closely for the first system

[Bernard Hurley]

On Sat, Jan 22, 2011 at 07:30:05AM -0700, Carl Sorensen wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 1/22/11 3:36 AM, "Reinhold Kainhofer" <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> > Am Freitag, 21. Januar 2011, um 19:13:54 schrieb address@hidden:
> >> At any rate, I think that with the understanding that we need to 1) use
> >> alignAboveContext for lyrics above a staff, and 2) make space for lyrics,
> >> with top-system-spacing, system-system-spacing, system-bottom-spacing, and
> >> default-staff-staff-spacing I think this becomes a Documentation bug (still
> >> Critical).
> > 
> > Does this also work if one page has lyrics above the top staff, while 
> > another
> > page does not? Or does the second page also reserve space for the 
> > non-existing
> > lyrics on that page (which would be quite bad from my point of view)?
> 
> IIUC, the current spacing engine *never* reserves space for lyrics depending
> on whether the lyrics are there or not.  It lays out the staves without
> considering the lyrics, and then pushes the lyrics into the gaps between the
> staves as best it can.
> 
> This came about because of requests to always have the staves in the same
> place on each page, IIRC.  Staves were moving about because of lyrics, and
> it was requested that lilypond stop doing that, so the new spacing was
> devised.
> 
> Hence my thought that we might want to have the possibility of reverting to
> the old behavior.
> 

Yep, it's probably best to make lily as flexible as possible!

It might be a good adea to be able to turn the old behaviour on and off so as 
to cope with a situation where the new behaviour causes problems only for a 
small part of a score.

/Bernard