Re: Controlling vertical spacing exactly - mini HOWTO

[Trevor Bača]

On 1/30/07, Trent Johnston <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi Trevor and all,
>
> I've been watching your thread on controlling vertical space as I'm very
> interested in this area.
>
> Joe Neeman gave me the following advice early in January of putting the
> "strict" control into the layout blook as follows:
>
> \layout {
>  \context { \Score \override NonMusicalPaperColumn
> #'line-break-system-details = #'((alignment-offsets . (0 -15 -30 )))  }
> }
>
> he went on to say:
>
> "If you want to change it mid-piece, you can use \override instead of
> \overrideProperty, but I think you have to do the \override one timestep
> before you want it to take effect."

Hi Trent,

Ah, right. I'd forgotten that you can \override the
NonMusicalPaperColumn grob globally for an entire context (which is
why all the examples I'd put into the thread so far show the
NonMusicalPaperColumn grob being overriden with \overrideProperty in
the middle of note input).

(FWIW, I think the same breadcrumb appears in the
alignment-vertical-spacing.ly reg test comments, viz: For technical
reasons, overrideProperty has to be used for setting properties on
individual object. \override in a \context block may still be used for
global overrides.)

I'm sure you already know that context settings in the layout-block
are equivalent to context settings in the with-block. But here's an
example just in case:

%%% WITH-BLOCK BEGIN %%%

\version "2.11.14"

\layout { indent = #0 }

\new Score \with {
  \override NonMusicalPaperColumn
  #'line-break-system-details = #'((alignment-offsets . (0 -15)))
} <<
  \new Staff {
     \repeat unfold 18 { c'4 c'4 c'4 c'4 }
  }
  \new Staff {
     \repeat unfold 18 { d'4 d'4 d'4 d'4 }
  }
> >

%%% END %%%

I'm a huge fan of with-blocks :-)




> P.S. The one thing I can't figure out is what the numbers refer to. Are they
> staff spaces as in what you would using in overriding minimum-Y-extent? I
> seem to be using larger numbers than what I would use when setting
> minimum-Y-extent.

In an earlier part of the thread Max wrote this:

> Maybe it would also be a good idea to mention that the numbers are
interpreted as multiples of the distance between adjacent staff lines
and that positive numbers move the staves/lyrics up and negative values
move them down (better to read it in the docs than having to cook up an
example to find out by trial and error).

I haven't tested this myself, but it certainly sounds right.


--
Trevor Bača
address@hidden