Re: Feature request (?): Horizontal spacing

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

address@hidden writes:
> On Thursday 10 March 2005 22.20, David Rogers wrote:
> > Erik Sandberg wrote:
> > >This is of course achievable by adding \breaks manually, but my
> > >suggestion is to add a property for a threshold value that somehow
> > >controls an upper bound of how tightly spaced a staff can be. This
> > >could e.g. be the minimum horizontal distance between notes, but I
> > >guess there could exist more logical variables as well.
> > >
> > >I can$,1ry(Bt recall anyone saying anything about this feature, and I 
> > >can$,1ry(Bt
> > >find it in the manual, so I suppose it doesn$,1ry(Bt exist. If it does,
> > >perhaps it should be mentioned in the docs, under global layout?
> >
> > I suppose a skilled human engraver would have a mental hierarchy of
> > which parameters to change first (from among staff spacing, note
> > spacing, staff sizes, etc), in order to "make it fit". The most lovely
> > thing would be if Lilypond was able to mimic that way of thinking, (i.e.
> > the first thought is "I want to make it fit on X pages", and everything
> > follows from there), rather than trial and error by the user.
> 
> Of course it would be nice if lilypond could do these decisions automatically 
> to some extent. (I don't think that automatic change of staff size would be a 
> good idea, but perhaps the horizontal spacing vs number of staffs). But I 
> fear that this could become a big task; AFAICU it would require that some 
> greedy algorithms have to be replaced by far more sophisticated ones.

That's not the problem. The real problem is that we can't determine
the number of pages necessary (the amount of vertical space required)
until after line breaking has been decided. This is because the
vertical space required may change due to hara kiri staves.

> My request is just to make a threshold value tweakable (and I'm hoping that 
> this variable already exists somewhere, so that the request wouldn't be too 
> hard to implement).

Why don't you just space the piece a little wider?

--
 Han-Wen Nienhuys   |   address@hidden   |   http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen