Hi, I cannot find in the documentation whether it is possible to have staves layout identically on all pages (matching side to side).
For example, in my problem the optimal spacing found by Lilypond (2.11) is 5 staves in the 1st page, 4 in the second, 5 in the 3rd, 3 in the last. In the second page, the 4 systems are evenly spaced, which looks very large compared to others. I would not like to set ragged-bottom for all pages. Imposing the number of staves per page does not look nice (17 is 4+4+4+4+1 or 5+5+2).
My ideal solution would be to enlarge the title area to have 4 + 5 + 5 + 3 staves, all matching side by side, that is the 1st on the 1st page being at the same height that the 2nd on the 2nd page (the title facing the 1st staff of the 2nd page). And the last page would be "ragged-bottomed" but still obeing the same vertical spacing.
Can I do this without having to find by hand empirically the exact title size and between-system distance?
Can I tell the layout to match staves on all pages when put side to side? (It seems that currently, staff layout is done page by page independently after finding the number of staves on each page.)
I found nothing on Documentation section 5.1.2 "Page formatting", neither on the Score context and NonMusicalPaperColumn (following the LSR's "PageLayout" advice).
Thanks, Eric
Hi Eric,
You might try looking at the subsections in chapter 5.5 "Vertical spacing" in the current version of the NR. Specifically, 5.5.3 "Explicit staff and system positioning" will give you a way to force exactly the same distance between staves within a system (using alignment-offsets); you can set alignment-offsets one time globally for the entire score, which is nice.
5.5.3 also talks about setting the X-offset subpart of the line-break-system-details group of settings. You can manually set this value at each line break and that will force systems to start at precisely specified distances down the page. This will indeed allow you to have systems line up *exactly* evenly across different pieces of paper. When I do this I write a script to insert all such overrides automatically; I'm not sure if there's a way to say the following:
"On each page: system 1 starts 20 units down the page; system 2 starts 80 units down the page; system 3 starts 115 units down the page; and system 4 starts 153 units down the page."
Maybe a superguru can figure out a way to make that incantation a single time globally for the entire score. But for my part, I simply insert line-break-system-details with X-offset commands at each line break to ensure absolute control of vertical positioning.
Hope this helps a little.
Trevor.