Re: Two questions about vertical layout and lyrics spacing

[Janek Warchoł]

On Sat, Mar 17, 2012 at 9:53 PM, Joe Neeman <address@hidden> wrote:
> There are two competing desires here: you want the systems to be spaced
> more-or-less evenly (ie. with a similar amount of space between the staves),
> and you want the white space between the systems to be more-or-less uniform.
> Currently, we give you three parameters to play with in order to achieve the
> best trade-off: basic-distance (to make the staff-staff distance uniform),
> minimum-distance and padding (to make the white space more uniform). It
> seems that you can't find settings for these parameters that gives you
> consistently good results across different systems. Could you suggest,
> therefore, an extra parameter (or a modification to the algorithm) that
> would give you the trade-off you want?

I can.
I've been thinking about this for a long time; i wanted to refine my
idea before posting it on the list, but as the subject appeared on
it's own i will take the opportunity to discuss it.
In my opinion we should calculate the actual whitespace area between
objects (systems, staves, lyrics, anything) using vertical skyline
integrals.  The spacing algorithm should then try to space the lines
so that the "whitespace area" between lines is similar.
I hope that the attachment will explain the nature of limitations in
the current system and why implementing skyline integrals would solve
them.
I'd like to elaborate on this topic, but i'm very busy now :(
However, i find it very important, so if you decide to start working
on it, i will be delighted to do all testing i can!

> For example, it would be easy to add some logic that would increase
> basic-distance between systems for every lyric line between them. Would this
> be useful?

I don't think that's an elegant and flexible solution.

cheers,
Janek