page break woes, ties, and more

[Robinson P. Tryon 03]

hi,

I'm using lilypond 2.2.5 on a debian box, and although I've stumbled through the
basics of lilypond, I have a few problems:

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I am unable to put page breaks exactly where I want them.

I'm trying to replicate a printed score as faithfully as possible, and although
"\break" seems to be working correctly, "\newpage" does not always put in a page
break.  If I make the font smaller, an extra system will creep onto the first
page (after the page break).  If I make the font larger, the first page is okay,
but there's only a single system on the second page (there should be three, and
there is certainly room for two with the larger font)

Is this a common problem?  Is "\newpage" a suggestion to lilypond/TeX that does
not necessarily need to be followed?

Is there something like \noBreak for \newpage ?  (\noNewpage ?)

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I also have a tie across chords and would like just one tie for all the notes. 
The doc on "Ties" references a "input/regression/tie-chord-partial.ly" that is
exactly what I want:  "For tying only a subset of the note heads of a pair of
chords".  Unfortunately, I can't seem to find it at the link given
<http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.2/input/regression/out-www/collated-files.html#tie-c
hord-partial.ly>

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I tried to put some italic and bold text in the "Header" section, but that
didn't seem to work.  I (ab)used the "poet" field to put some text on the LHS,
and found out about subtitle and subsubtitle; simple tweaks are nice, but is
there a way to have more control over the header layout without having to insert
the liypond doc into a separate TeX file?

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Is there an IRC channel for lilypond?

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That's probably more than enough questions in one email...


thanks!
- Robinson


P.S.  if seeing my .ly files would help you answer my questions, I'll gladly cut
them down and send them along.